Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
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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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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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Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
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Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).
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If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
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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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Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.
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Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.
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Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
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What fools call 'wasting time' is most often the best investment.
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Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.
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Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
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In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
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This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ...
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Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
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What they call 'play' (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.
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Economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. (page 85)
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It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.
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A theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
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It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.
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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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Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.