Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
-
We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
-
We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes -fragile otherwise.
-
The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
-
Randomness works well in search-sometimes better than humans.
-
Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.
-
Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.
-
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.
-
The casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known, Gaussian (i.e., bell-curve), and almost computable.
-
If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.
-
Simplicity is not so simple to attain.
-
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.
-
Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.
-
Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.
-
I have never had personal debt and never will.
-
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
-
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.
-
In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.