Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotations | Page 2

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.

An ad hominem attack against an individual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.

You never win an argument until they attack your person.

People who forecast simply because "that's my job," knowing pretty well that their forecast is ineffectual, are not what I would call ethical. What they do is no different from repeating lies simply because "it's my job."

Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending

If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.

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.

Someone who says "I am busy" is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.

If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.

Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut, and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant.

You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system.

Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

Anything that provides you with very, very stable income, very stable conditions, maybe generally stable, that often, it masks real risks, risks of blow-ups.

Things always become obvious after the fact

The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up

We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.

The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history

When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.

Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability.

We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.

You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.

Don't disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don't understand their logic. Don't pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific 'evidence'.

To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.

Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

What I learned on my own I still remember

Remember that you are a Black Swan.

Simplicity is not so simple to attain.

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free

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

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.

Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

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

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

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

Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur

If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False.

Scientists don't know what they are talking about when they talk about religion. Religion has nothing to do with belief, and I don't believe it has any negative impact on people's lives outside of intolerance. Why do I go to church? It's like asking, why did you marry that woman? You make up reasons, but it's probably just smell. I love the smell of candles. It's an aesthetic thing.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

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.

Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.

If you let markets - in general, my belief is that if you let markets give you information, they'll give you the information rather than artificially prop up everything.

People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide.

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.

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.

If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters.

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

The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death

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."

If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.

Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.

This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

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

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.

The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it

Only the autodidacts are free,

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.

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options ... I am an options trader, and I don't understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them?

Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.

People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.

The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither

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

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

Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.

Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.

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.

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.

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.

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

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality - without exploiting them for fun and profit

The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane.

The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.

Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

What they call "play" (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.

Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .

The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

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

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.

The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.

The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.

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.

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

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).

What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment.

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

Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

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