Nassim Nicholas Taleb
162 quotes
Biography
"Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking."
"Things always become obvious after the fact"
"Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness."
"A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see"
"The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist"
"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...."
"You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race."
"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."
"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."
"We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible."
"Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions."
"It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear."
"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."
"Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance."
"Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category."
"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."
"[T]he epic poet did not judge heroes by the result... their fate depended on totally external forces... Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost."
"Mixing forecast and prophecy is symptomatic of randomness-foolishness..."
"I do not dispute that arguments should be simplified to their maximum... but people often confuse complex ideas that cannot be simplified into a media-friendly statement as symptomatic of a confused mind. ...MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify... beyond... requirement. (...I am myself the unhappy holder of the degree.)"
"[T]he mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward the sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news."
"From the standpoint of an institution, the existence of a risk manager has less to do with actual risk reduction than it has to do with the impression of risk reduction."
"In the early 1990s... I became addicted to the various Monte Carlo engines, which I taught myself to build... The dividend of the computer revolution... did not come in... e-mail messages and... chat rooms; it was in the sudden availability of fast processors capable of generating a million sample paths per minute."
"My models showed that ultimately almost nobody really survived; bears dropped like flies in the rally and bulls ended up being slaughtered... But there was one exception... option buyers... could buy the insurance against blowup..."
"I have two ways of learning from history: from the past, by reading the elders; and from the future, thanks to my Monte Carlo toy."
"A... vicious effect of... is that those that are good at predicting the past... think of themselves as good at predicting the future... [W]e live in a world where important events are not predictable..."