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Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, and former option trader and risk analyst, whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan has been described by The Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II.Taleb is the author of the Incerto, a five volume philosophical essay on uncertainty published between 2001 and 2018 . He has been a professor at several universities, serving as a Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering since September 2008. He has been co-editor-in-chief of the academic journal Risk and Decision Analysis since September 2014. He has also been a practitioner of mathematical finance, a hedge fund manager, and a derivatives trader, and is currently listed as a scientific adviser at Universa Investments.He criticized the risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises, subsequently profiting from the late-2000s financial crisis. He advocates what he calls a "black swan robust" society, meaning a society that can withstand difficult-to-predict events. He proposes antifragility in systems, that is, an ability to benefit and grow from a certain class of random events, errors, and volatility as well as "convex tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means that decentralized experimentation outperforms directed research. Wikipedia  

✵ 11. September 1960  •  Other names نسیم نقولا طالب, 나심 니컬러스 탈레브
Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: 196 quotes30 likes

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

“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)

“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

“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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 162

“You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 28

“Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 64

“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.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 174

“It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 44

“Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 8

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

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 95

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

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 39

“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.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 149

“One cannot assert authority by accepting one's own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge - we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 192

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 161

“Randomness works well in search—sometimes better than humans.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 103

“Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.”

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

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 203

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 46

“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.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

“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.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 24