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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
199 quotes
“Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don't even have a name for.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us—and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility—and sacrifice—of the lower one.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)—likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher ...”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ...”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Randomness works well in search—sometimes better than humans.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An option hides where we don't want it to hide.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]n academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world, there is.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]t is about distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price for your mistakes. ...If you give an opinion and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In case you are giving economic views: Don't tell me what you "think," just tell me what's in your portfolio.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[N]ever engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Evidence of submission is displayed by the employee’s going through years depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, his ritualistic and punctual arrival at an office, his denying himself his own schedule, and his not having beaten up anyone on the way back home after a bad day. He is an obedient, housebroken dog.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What we saw worldwide from 2014 to 2018, from India to the U.K. to the U.S., was a rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy League, Oxford-Cambridge or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think, and… 5) whom to vote for.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Studying neurobiology to understand humans is like studying ink to understand literature.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Statistics... is all based on... the steady augmentation of the confidence level... [F]or an n times increase in sample size, we increase our knowledge by the square root on n. ...Where statistics ...fails us, is when we have distributions that are not symmetric... If there is a very small probability of finding a red ball in an urn dominated by black ones, then our knowledge about the absence of red balls will increase [even more] slowly. ...On the other hand, our knowledge of the presence of red balls will dramatically improve once one of them is found. This asymmetry in knowledge... is the central philosophical problem for... David Hume and Karl Popper.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The major problem with inference... is that those whose profession it is to derive conclusions from data often fall into the trap faster and more confidently... The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it. For common wisdom... is to base... decision making on the following principle: It is very unlikely for someone to perform... well in a consistent fashion without doing something right. ...[I]f someone performed better... in the past then there is a great[er] chance of performing better than the crowd in the future... But... [a] small knowledge of probability can lead to worse results than no knowledge at all.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us use 10,000 fictional investment managers... [O]nce a manager has a single bad year, he is thrown out of the sample. ...[T]oss a coin; heads and the manager will make $10,000 over the year, tails and he will lose $10,000. ...We have, in a fair game, 313 managers who made money five years in a row. ...[I]f we throw one of these ...into the real world we would get ...comments on his remarkable style, his incisive mind... His biographer will dwell on ...a great mind in the making. ...[S]hould he stop performing (...his odds ...have stayed at 50%) they would start ...finding fault with his dissipated lifestyle. They will find something he stopped doing, and attribute his failure... The truth ...he simply ran out of luck.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source