Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
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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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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 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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We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
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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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A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.
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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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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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For the robust, an error is information.
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We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.
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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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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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You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
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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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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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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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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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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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The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.