Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.
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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 have never had personal debt and never will.
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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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Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.
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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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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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Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.
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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.
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Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.
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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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The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.
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Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.
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We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
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Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.
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When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.
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A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
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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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To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.
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A man is morally free when... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation.
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Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.
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It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
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We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.