Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

210 Sourced Quotes

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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known, Gaussian (i. e., bell-curve), and almost computable.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called work in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking outside the box ; and when they die they are put in a box.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is now the scientific consensus that our risk-avoidance mechanism is not mediated by the cognitive modules of our brain, but rather by the emotional ones. This may have made us fit for the Pleistocene era. Our risk machinery is designed to run away from tigers; it is not designed for the information-laden modern world.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Consider that the turkey's experience may have, rather than no value, a negative value. It learned from observation, as we are all advised to do (hey, after all, this is what is believed to be the scientific method). Its confidence increased as the number of friendly feedings grew, and it felt increasingly safe even though the slaughter was more and more imminent. Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest!

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What is non-measurable and non-predictable will remain non-measurable and non-predictable... no matter how much hate mail I get.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I try to make money infrequently, as infrequently as possible simply because I believe that rare events are not fairly valued, and that the rarer the event, the more undervalued it will be in price.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb