Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes - Page 13

The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.

What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.

I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington.

Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.

Political life loves some volatility.

The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.

I am happy everywhere except in places where I see glitz and rich farts. I am happiest in Brooklyn, where the concentration of rich farts is minimal.

I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.

Janet Yellen at the FED is equivalent to having a biology schoolteacher who has never seen blood perform brain surgery.

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely."

I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.

It is much harder to become independent if you are wealthy than to become wealthy if you are independent.

Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.

In the United States large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation’s funeral at our expense.

Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.

Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.

We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.

Anything organic requires some dose of variability so it can adapt all the time, and fixing things is not a good idea.

It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits.

A washing machine needs constant maintenance. It doesn't want any harm. It wants tranquility, and you need someone to - you're not going to harm it by continuously monitoring it and adjusting it.