Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance.
Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes —fragile otherwise.
When conflicted between two choices, take neither.
In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.
Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.
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.
You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.
While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
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.
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.
People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.
Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems.
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.
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.
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.
The antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility—and sacrifice—of the lower one.