Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

the more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake of thinking that skills in, say, skiing translate unfailingly into skills in managing a pottery workshop or a bank department, or that a good chess player would be a good strategist in real life).

A hotshot is someone temporarily perceived to be of some importance, rather than perceived to be of some temporary importance.

People reveal much more about themselves while lying.

Freedom or jail clips inserted, a baby's being born/ Same time a man is murdered, the beginning and end.

Statin drugs are meant to lower cholesterol in your blood. But there is an asymmetry, and a severe one. One needs to treat fifty high risk persons for five years to avoid a single cardiovascular event. Statins can potentially harm people who are not very sick, for whom the benefits are either minimal or totally nonexistent.

Sometimes market data becomes a simple trap; it shows you the opposite of its nature... [e.g.,] Currencies that exhibit the largest historical stability... are the most prone to crashes.

The difference between banks and the Mafia: banks have better legal-regulatory expertise, but the Mafia understands public opinion.

The opposite of success isn't failure; it is name dropping.

Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembered the event, and without realizing it,

Mother Nature has given us some defense mechanisms: as in Aesop’s fable, one of these is our ability to consider that the grapes we cannot (or did not) reach are sour. But an aggressively stoic prior disdain and rejection of the grapes is even more rewarding. Be aggressive; be the one to resign, if you have the guts.

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

The only objective definition of aging is when a person starts to talk about aging.

It is my great hope someday to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect.

We see the obvious and visible consequences, not the invisible and less obvious ones. Yet those unseen consequences.., generally are more meaningful.

he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.