Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Trending quotes

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“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), pp. 10–11

“We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Learning to Expect the Unexpected," The New York Times (2004-04-08}

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

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 87

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”

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

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

“When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.”

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

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

“Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 109

“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.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 84

“The antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility—and sacrifice—of the lower one.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 74

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 20

“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.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 41

“There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (…), and a random one (…). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 142

“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.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 72

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

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 54

“Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 105

“The casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known, Gaussian (i. e., bell-curve), and almost computable.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 127

“The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; … the wise does neither.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 53

“Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. 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. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. 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.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), pp. 225-226

“A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 45