Quote #4

[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.

More from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  1. [I]t does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
  2. A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.
  3. 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…
  4. I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.
  5. 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 …
  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…
  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.

All Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes