Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

Nassim Nicholas Taleb teases the overconfident, mixing sharp humor with thoughts on risk, uncertainty and psychology.

41 quotes

My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don't have the guts to sometimes say: I don't know....

#1
You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment & make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race.

#2
[I]t does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

#3
[U]nlike 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.

#4
A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

#5
I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

#6
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.

#7
The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

#8
At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.

#9
Science evolves from funeral to funeral.

#10
Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.

#11
We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.

#12
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!

#13
A casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known.

#14
Probability is a liberal art.

#15
Forecasting by bureacrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.

#16
[T]he 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.

#17
In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information.

#18
[G]ain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.

#19
It is now the scientific consensus that our risk-avoidance mechanism is not mediated by the cognitive modules of our brain, but rather by the emotional ones. This may have made us fit for the Pleistocene era. Our risk machinery is designed to run away from tigers; it is not designed for the information-laden modern world.

#20
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.

#21
... we should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.

#22
Never cross a river because it is on average 4 feet deep.

#23
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.
“Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing”
To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.
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.
In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice.
My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.
Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.
Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.
We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.
We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.
Any system that is deprived of its natural volatility, with government up (unintelligible) volatile, any system becomes very fragile.
You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.
Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea.
You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually .
But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.
Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.