Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

My objective is to die with my shoes on.

It takes five years to learn how to make money; and twenty-five to learn how to not lose it.

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

[In] economics... you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. Now the spirit of such methods, called scientism by its detractors, continued into the discipline of finance as a few technicians thought their mathematical knowledge could lead them to understand markets. The practice of financial engineering came along with massive doses of pseudoscience. (page 115)

One categorical: it is easier to fast than diet. You cannot be "slightly" kosher or halal by only eating a small portion of ham.

For soldiers, we use the term "mercenary," but we absolve employees of responsibility with "everybody needs to make a living."

It takes a lot of skills to be virtuous without being boring.

We are the first society in which being an elder is not indicative of superior fitness. We are also one of the very few societies in which being an elder does not bring a higher social status.

BONUS - 5 More Text-Only Taleb Quotes that you enjoyed:

- "It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness."

- "It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones and win against better rivals. Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor,inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best."

- "A prostitute who sells her body (temporarily) is vastly more honorable than someone who sells his opinion for promotion or job tenure."

- "When people call you intelligent it is almost always because they agree with you."

- "The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything."

It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life — with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.

Progress is almost never linear. Ups and downs and bursts.

The IYI subscribes to The New Yorker, a journal designed so philistines can learn to fake a conversation about evolution, neurosomething, cognitive biases, and quantum mechanics.

Then I rose, wiping the blunts ash from my clothes
then froze only to blow the herb smoke through my nose
and told my little man that i'm a go cyprose
there's some jewels in the skull that he can sell if he chose
words of wisdom from nas try to rise up above

Finally, when young people who “want to help mankind” come to me asking, “What should I do? I want to reduce poverty, save the world,” and similar noble aspirations at the macro-level, my suggestion is: 1) Never engage in virtue signaling; 2) Never engage in rent-seeking; 3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business. Yes, take risk, and if you get rich (which is optional), spend your money generously on others. We need people to take (bounded) risks. The entire idea is to move the descendants of Homo sapiens away from the macro, away from abstract universal aims, away from the kind of social engineering that brings tail risks to society. Doing business will always help (because it brings about economic activity without large-scale risky changes in the economy); institutions (like the aid industry) may help, but they are equally likely to harm (I am being optimistic; I am certain that except for a few most do end up harming). Courage (risk taking) is the highest virtue. We need entrepreneurs.

The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.