Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes - page 7

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. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
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. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility-and sacrifice-of the lower one. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain-our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known, Gaussian (i. e., bell-curve), and almost computable. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters - you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When conflicted between two choices, take neither. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
[E]conomists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
[E]conomics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb