Nassim Nicholas Taleb - People Quotes

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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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started in the investment business (in place of going to dental school), rather than on their ability to produce profits.

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
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
The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
One cannot assert authority by accepting one's own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge - we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don't have the guts to sometimes say: I don't know....

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb