Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.
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Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
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Economics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)
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They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called 'work' in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking 'outside the box'; and when they die they are put in a box.
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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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It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.
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Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.
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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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I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.
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The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.
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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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An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
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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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A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.
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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
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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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What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.
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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
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Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.
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Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.
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A theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
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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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Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.
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It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.