Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes - Page 5

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

Paul Krugman is a danger to society!

I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.

There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.

Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.

The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.

You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system.

Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.

Simplicity is not so simple to attain.

In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations

Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears

Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.

The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.

Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act - if you can't control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that.

Stoicism is about the *domestication* of emotions, not their elimination.

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. [...] We take what we know a little too seriously.

When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness.