Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes - Page 10

Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.

The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology.

Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.

Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.

[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.

Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.

Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.

Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.

While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.

The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

Rationalism crashes in the tails.

The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.

Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.

Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.

A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.

If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters.

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.

A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.

Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.

The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane.

Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum