Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes:

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  • Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.

  • 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.

  • We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.

  • If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.

  • People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.

  • I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.

  • You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.

  • Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them.

  • Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.

  • We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

  • I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged.

  • Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.

  • A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

  • Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.

  • Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

  • 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.

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

  • It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

  • Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.

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

  • Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all.

  • Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.

  • The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.

  • What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.

  • We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.

  • The mortgage crisis is a clear instance of consumers who needed protection. There was predatory lending to people who didn't know what they were doing.

  • The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.

  • I don't go to the doctor except when I'm very ill, and when I go to India, I drink a drop of local water.

  • You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.

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

  • If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.

  • We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.

  • I've been telling anyone willing to listen that banks have a tendency to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves that they are conservative and nonvolatile.

  • The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.

  • When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.

  • Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.

  • I am happy everywhere except in places where I see glitz and rich farts. I am happiest in Brooklyn, where the concentration of rich farts is minimal.

  • Love without sacrifice is like theft

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

  • Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

  • true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing

  • The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death

  • English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).

  • The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions

  • Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

  • Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.

  • Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

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

  • My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates-and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain.

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

  • Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.

  • In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice.

  • Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.

  • Remember that you are a Black Swan.

  • The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.

  • Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.

  • The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

  • The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.

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

  • A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.

  • My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.

  • Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

  • For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.

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

  • What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.

  • 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.

  • Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending

  • Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.

  • Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.

  • Anything organic requires some dose of variability so it can adapt all the time, and fixing things is not a good idea.

  • Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.

  • Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.

  • Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.

  • Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.

  • History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.

  • Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.

  • 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.

  • I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.

  • The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference

  • The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely."

  • While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.

  • It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag , a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation.

  • To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.

  • All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.

  • Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters-you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.

  • 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.

  • Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse

  • Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

  • They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)

  • The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

  • Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.

  • The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history

  • This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

  • 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.

  • Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.

  • You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

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

  • I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.

  • Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

  • Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

  • 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.

  • The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

  • If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?

  • The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

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

  • There is asymmetry. Those who die do so very early in the game, while those who live go on living very long. Whenever there is asymmetry in outcomes, the average survival has nothing to do with the median survival.

  • Black Swans and tail events run the socioeconomic world

  • A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see

  • A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point

  • Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

  • Don't disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don't understand their logic. Don't pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific 'evidence'.

  • Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.

  • 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.

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

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

  • Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network.

  • A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

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