Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.
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When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
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We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.
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Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
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If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.
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You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.
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At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.
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The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.
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Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete.
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All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.
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Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.
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Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
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You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.
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I don't go to the doctor except when I'm very ill, and when I go to India, I drink a drop of local water.
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I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.
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Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.
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We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
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Randomness works well in search-sometimes better than humans.
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If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.
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The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
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Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.
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The casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known, Gaussian (i.e., bell-curve), and almost computable.
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Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.
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Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.