Tuesday, March 19, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb


Essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
Taleb quotes
Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.
Taleb
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.




Taleb Nassim Nicholas quotes
It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.
Taleb Nassim Nicholas
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 quotes
What they call “play” (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
Taleb Nassim Nicholas quotes
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.
Taleb
The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.
Taleb Nassim Nicholas
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
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 quotes
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Randomness works well in search—sometimes better than humans.
Taleb quotes
There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.
Taleb Nassim Nicholas
Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.
Taleb Nassim Nicholas quotes
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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 quotes
Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
Taleb Nassim Nicholas
I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.


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