Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Use

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst. Explore interesting quotes on use.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: 392   quotes 23   likes

“If you hear a "prominent" economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“We tend to use knowledge as therapy.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 69

Knowledge

“This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

Parent , Help , Hurt

“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)

Confidence

“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)

“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

Error

“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

Failure , Appearance

“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

“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

People , Knowledge , Personality

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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