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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
199 quotes
“Optimism, it is said, is predictive of success. ...It can also be predictive of failure. Optimistic people... take more risks as they are overconfident of the about the odds; those who win show up among the rich and famous, others fail and disappear from the analysis.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The information that a person derived some profit in the past... by itself, is neither meaningful nor relevant. We need to know the size of the population from which he came. If the initial population is 10,000 managers, I would ignore the results.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Professor Karl Pearson... devised the first test of nonrandomness... He examined millions of runs of what was called a Monte Carlo (the old name for a roulette wheel)... He discovered... the runs were not purely random. ...Philosophers of statistics call this the reference case problem to explain that there is no true attainable randomness in practice, only in theory.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even the fathers of statistical science forgot that a random series is bound to exhibit some pattern... Pearson was among the first scholars interested in creating artificial random number generators, tables one could use as inputs for... simulations (precursors of our Monte Carlo simulator). ...[T]hey did not want these tables to exhibit... regularity. Yet real randomness does not look random! ...A single random run is bound to exhibit some pattern ...”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wittgenstein's ruler: "Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler." (page 224)”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[E]conomists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. (page 85)”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[E]conomics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[In] economics... you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. Now the spirit of such methods, called scientism by its detractors, continued into the discipline of finance as a few technicians thought their mathematical knowledge could lead them to understand markets. The practice of financial engineering came along with massive doses of pseudoscience. (page 115)”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag, a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We tend to use knowledge as therapy.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consider that the turkey's experience may have, rather than no value, a negative value. It learned from observation, as we are all advised to do (hey, after all, this is what is believed to be the scientific method). Its confidence increased as the number of friendly feedings grew, and it felt increasingly safe even though the slaughter was more and more imminent. Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest!”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known, Gaussian (i.e., bell-curve), and almost computable.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One cannot assert authority by accepting one's own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge - we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters — you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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).”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source