Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
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Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.
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Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.
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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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Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category.
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History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, ... The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.
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You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
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You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race.
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There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.
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Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese.
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Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients - and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.
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We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.
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This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters - you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.
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The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.
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I try to make money infrequently, as infrequently as possible simply because I believe that rare events are not fairly valued, and that the rarer the event, the more undervalued it will be in price.
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Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.
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The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
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Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession.
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A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.
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The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.