Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes - Page 8

The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.

A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.

Information is bad for knowledge.

For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.

There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient, and a random one. In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.

Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options ... I am an options trader, and I don't understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them?

Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.

Make sure that you are in a situation where the constant mistakes are small and can be used for something.

Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.

Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.

I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18.

You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.

Dress your best on your execution day. Be extremely courteous to your assistant when you lose money. Try not to blame others for your fate, even if they deserve blame. Never exhibit any self-pity. Do not complain.

I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.

Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually .

Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.

You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool for improvement.

I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism