Top 367 Quotes & Sayings by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Page 6

It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

Rationalism crashes in the tails.

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.

What kills me makes others stronger.

But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.

Bankers, they're not harmed by their mistakes. They benefit when things go right, and the society pays the price.

Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.

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.

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.

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.

I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.

If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.

Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.

true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing

The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started in the investment business (in place of going to dental school), rather than on their ability to produce profits.

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. 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.

Any system that is deprived of its natural volatility, with government up (unintelligible) volatile, any system becomes very fragile.

Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.

Character is proportionate to N, the number of consecutive failures without being discouraged, or equivalently, the number of successive rejections without being intimidated.

Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.

A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.

Information is bad for knowledge.

Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans.

The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.

I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.

It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.

Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

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

I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington.

It's harder to say 'no' when you really mean it.

The bonus for bankers fragilizes the system. Someone has the upside at the expense of others.

While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.

A washing machine needs constant maintenance. It doesn't want any harm. It wants tranquility, and you need someone to - you're not going to harm it by continuously monitoring it and adjusting it.

It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.

Janet Yellen at the FED is equivalent to having a biology schoolteacher who has never seen blood perform brain surgery.

Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.

It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.

Switzerland is the perfect place where you have volatility at a municipal level that nothing up top - small units competing with each other.

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology.

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.

Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.

Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.

In the United States large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation’s funeral at our expense.

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).

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely."

Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.

A system, artificially stabilized, and of course you have hidden risks under the surface, and you don't know where the risks are.

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.

Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.

As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

It is much harder to become independent if you are wealthy than to become wealthy if you are independent.

Anything organic requires some dose of variability so it can adapt all the time, and fixing things is not a good idea.

The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.

Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.