1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
page 4

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

“A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 147

Personality

“[In] economics… you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. Now the spirit of such methods, called scientism by its detractors, continued into the discipline of finance as a few technicians thought their mathematical knowledge could lead them to understand markets. The practice of financial engineering came along with massive doses of pseudoscience.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

page 115
Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Mathematics , Understanding , Knowledge

“For the robust, an error is information.”

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

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 72

Error

“There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Source: Five: Survival of the Least Fit—Can Evolution be Fool by Randomness | A Review of Market Fools of Randomness Constants | The Traits They Shared
Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Loyalty , Idea

“Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

which they do not control
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)

Life , Business , Learning

“An option hides where we don't want it to hide.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 184

“Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 127

“A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.”

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

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

Age

“My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know….”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Home Page http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/

People , Knowledge

“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.)

“Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Skin in the Game

Source: Skin in the Game (2018), p. 214

Truth , Understanding , Science

“If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Skin in the Game

Source: Skin in the Game (2018), p. 185

Idea , Life

“People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Skin in the Game

Source: Skin in the Game (2018), p. 162

People

“Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Skin in the Game

Source: Skin in the Game (2018), p. 23

Penalty

“Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Skin in the Game

Source: Skin in the Game (2018), p. 12

Personality

“The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Skin in the Game

Source: Skin in the Game (2018), p. 7

Time , Business , Error , Knowledge