Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotations | Page 3

Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates-and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain.

Don't aim to be perfect! Aim to be antifragile

The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

Information is bad for knowledge.

There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.

If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull - you don't even know how many sides the dice have!

History doesn't crawl; it leaps.

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.

Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.

If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.

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.

Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.

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 verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.

The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.

What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.

The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.

A good rule of thumb is as follows: If the numbers come from somebody wearing a tie (Wall Street economist or analyst, industry public relations department, captive think tank academic and so on), you ought to be very skeptical. By design messages from these people are intended to move markets, move merchandise and/or move public policy and are not a comment on the state of the physical universe.

Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.

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

You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.

Rationalism crashes in the tails.

The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.

By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.

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

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag , a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation.

An option hides where we don't want it to hide.

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.

Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans.

When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.

Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.

Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.

Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.

For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.

The 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.

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

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.

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.

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

I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism

For the robust, an error is information.

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

Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.

The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.

We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.

Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

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

Luck is the grand equalizer.

They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.

It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.

Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.

We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.

Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.

Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum

Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.

When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse

By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!

Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

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.

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.

My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist

What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.

In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations

A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see

They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

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

Paul Krugman is a danger to society!

The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18...

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.

There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.

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

Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.

An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile.

Dress your best on your execution day. Be extremely courteous to your assistant when you lose money. Try not to blame others for your fate, even if they deserve blame. Never exhibit any self-pity. Do not complain.

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.

When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness.

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

Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.

What kills me makes others stronger,