Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.
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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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Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.
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We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes -fragile otherwise.
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Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.
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For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.
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If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.
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Simplicity is not so simple to attain.
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Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
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Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
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Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.
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There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
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Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to 'restore confidence.' Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.
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Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.
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Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.
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I have never had personal debt and never will.
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It is now the scientific consensus that our risk-avoidance mechanism is not mediated by the cognitive modules of our brain, but rather by the emotional ones. This may have made us fit for the Pleistocene era. Our risk machinery is designed to run away from tigers; it is not designed for the information-laden modern world.
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The key to wealth is that it doesn't matter. Once you've had it, you don't think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches.
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In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.
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We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
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Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.
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There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic 'scientist', the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call 'epistemic arrogance', this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.
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The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.
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Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality.