Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
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It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.
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We tend to use knowledge as therapy.
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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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There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.
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I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.
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If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.
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What they call 'play' (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.
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But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.
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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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For the robust, an error is information.
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The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.
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The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
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Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
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Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
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The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.
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Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
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Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.
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If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.
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Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
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I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.
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Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
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My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know....
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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.