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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   quotes 23   likes

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

“Simplicity is not so simple to attain.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 11

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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.)

Feeling , Confidence , Learning

“Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Problem

“An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 3

Idea

“I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

“Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence.” Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Confidence , Dependency

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 102

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

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 57

Way , Courage

“Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 7

Failure , Sense

“A man is morally free when… he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 16

Men , World , Sincerity

“This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters — you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 209

“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.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 185

Death , Past

“When conflicted between two choices, take neither.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 71

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

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 85

Fools , Learning

“I try to make money infrequently, as infrequently as possible simply because I believe that rare events are not fairly valued, and that the rarer the event, the more undervalued it will be in price.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Money

“Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Game , Reality

“Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 66

“People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 19

People , Clothes

“Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 22

Mathematics , Understanding , Personality

“[E]conomists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

page 85
Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Intelligence , Knowledge , Reality

“It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 75

Pain , Thinking

“The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 20

Books

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 63

Feeling , Dead

“History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, […] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 8

God , History , Reading

“The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 31

“The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 94

“[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 116

“Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Motivation

“Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 25

Drink , Water , Wine , Reading

“It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Failure

“Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don't even have a name for.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 33

Life

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 62

Way , Learning , Country

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 55

Age

“Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 68

Men

“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.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), pp. 107-108

Courage , Nature

“Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 128

People , Art

“The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5d5aa24e-23a4-11de-996a-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1, Financial Times, 2009-04-07.
Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world (2009)

People , Failure , Universe

“At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Thinking , Dead

“What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment.”

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

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

Fools , Time

“Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice; being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

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

“[E]conomics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

page 257
Fooled by Randomness (2001)

“Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 122

Exercises , Understanding , Nature

“If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Life , Health , Disease , Idea

“Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

People , Thinking , Drawing

“Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 22

Dreams , Success , Childhood , Adulthood

“Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.”

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

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

Literature , Science

“Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.”

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

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

History

“They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 31

Food , Home , Thinking , Study

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 49

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