Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Trending quotes

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb: 392 quotes30 likes

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

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p.58

“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.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 5

“You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.”

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

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

“Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 30

“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.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 106

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 138

“In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 4

“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.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 78

“Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 171

“Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 21

“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.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Learning to Expect the Unexpected," http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb04/taleb_index.html The New York Times (2004-04-08}

“You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Home Page

“It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 9

“You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 27

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

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 40

“Wittgenstein's ruler: "Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler."”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

page 224
Fooled by Randomness (2001)

“Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 101

“You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Skin in the Game (2018)

“It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world (2009)

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

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 26