Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.

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.

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.

Only the autodidacts are free.

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

Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically - while bankers strike it rich.

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

The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.

I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.

If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False.

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.

I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.

I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.

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.

Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.

Remember that you are a Black Swan.

Luck is the grand equalizer.

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite.

Don't aim to be perfect! Aim to be antifragile

I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington.

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

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

Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.

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

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.

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

What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.

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

Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense

Janet Yellen at the FED is equivalent to having a biology schoolteacher who has never seen blood perform brain surgery.

Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.

Switzerland is the perfect place where you have volatility at a municipal level that nothing up top - small units competing with each other.

Political life loves some volatility.

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

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

We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.

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

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

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.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

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)

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

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

We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future-but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.

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

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

Character is proportionate to N, the number of consecutive failures without being discouraged, or equivalently, the number of successive rejections without being intimidated.

You find peace by coming to terms with what you don't know.