Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
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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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The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.
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Simplicity is not so simple to attain.
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Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.
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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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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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Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.
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To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.
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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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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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Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.
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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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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.
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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 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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We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
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A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
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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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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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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.