Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
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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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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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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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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.
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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 so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.
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The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.
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We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.
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When conflicted between two choices, take neither.
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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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The mortgage crisis is a clear instance of consumers who needed protection. There was predatory lending to people who didn't know what they were doing.
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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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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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We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
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The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.
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Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.
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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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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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A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.
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Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties.
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What they call 'play' (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.
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The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.