Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.

It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent “studying” the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world.

The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.

at any point in time, the richest traders are often the worst traders. This, I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those that are best fit to the latest cycle. This does not happen too often with dentists or pianists — because these professions are more immune to randomness.

That's it for April's Top 10 @TalebWisdom quotes (+ a bonus).

Which one was your favorite? Let me know in the replies 👇

Actors should not be the ones lektchuring the rest of us on ethics & morality. They also have a tendency to conflate virtue and its external manifestation, given that everything in their world is appearance.

The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.

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 idea of: watch what people do not what they (or their staffers) say.

The natural benefit of a cell phone, laptop, and other indispensable modern items is the joy one gets finding the object after losing it.

Happy birthday America the land of the free, the self-standing! Friends, remember that: Unless you build a habit of making money on your own, standalone, you will find yourself, at some point, depending on the whims of someone else who will run your life. When it's too late.

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 problem with "liberals" tagging to someone an identity/race/category to minoritify is that it makes race salient so you end up particularizing the general. Humans have zillions of dimensions & it gets absorbed into a category.

Globalism has the effect of separating some people a step too far from the fruits of their actions.

Mistaking a naive observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.