Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.
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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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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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Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
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The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.
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The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
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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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I have never had personal debt and never will.
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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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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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It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.
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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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Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.
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Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.
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I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged.
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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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A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.
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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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It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us-and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits.
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Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.
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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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Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.
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When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.