Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

210 Sourced Quotes

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality.

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

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
I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Randomness works well in search—sometimes better than humans.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.

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
If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.

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
If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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