Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
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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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Simplicity is not so simple to attain.
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Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.
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Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice; being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.
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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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A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
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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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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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We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
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I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or 'incentives' for skill.
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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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We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.
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For the robust, an error is information.
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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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You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
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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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Only in recent history has 'working hard' signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.
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We tend to use knowledge as therapy.
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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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In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
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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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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.