Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes - Page 12

I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.

But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.

Switzerland is the perfect place where you have volatility at a municipal level that nothing up top - small units competing with each other.

What kills me makes others stronger.

Any system that is deprived of its natural volatility, with government up (unintelligible) volatile, any system becomes very fragile.

Character is proportionate to N, the number of consecutive failures without being discouraged, or equivalently, the number of successive rejections without being intimidated.

Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.

Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea.

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.

It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.

It's harder to say 'no' when you really mean it.

I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.

Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.

It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.

Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans.

I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.

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).

The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.

Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.

Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.

It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.