Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes - Page 11

People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.

Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.

I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

If you let markets - in general, my belief is that if you let markets give you information, they'll give you the information rather than artificially prop up everything.

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.

If you're going to fail, you'd rather fail early than fail late in general.

My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates-and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain.

Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.

As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have.

You never win an argument until they attack your person.

Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.

My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism

Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.

We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.

If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.

History doesn't crawl; it leaps.

It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.

The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.

What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.

I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.

Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse

Don't read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

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.