Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Trending quotes (page 10)

“There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)—likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher …”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 79

Dead

“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.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Quoted in the introduction to "A Talk with Nassim Nicholas Taleb," Edge (April 2004) http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb04/taleb_index.html

World

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 56

“Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 65

“We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes —fragile otherwise.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 107

Error , Understanding

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 198

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 17

Life , Science

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 15

Fraud

“Consider that the turkey's experience may have, rather than no value, a negative value.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Black Swan

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!
Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), pp. 40–41 (Taleb attributes the parable of the turkey to Bertrand Russell, who originally wrote of a chicken.)