Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance.
The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.
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.
We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
An option hides where we don't want it to hide.
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.
Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category.
There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.
The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.
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 (which they do not control).
Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.
[E]conomics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)
Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.
If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
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 ...