Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

More data—such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street—can make you miss the big truck.

"It was a different feeling: it is hard to focus on a conversation, especially when it is mathematical, when you have just personally earned several hundreds of times the annual salary of the researcher trying to tell you that you are "wrong," by betting against his representation of the world."

Intellect without balls is like a racecar without tires.

If majority of academics vote Democrat, it is not random: they 1) don't have skin in the game, (others take risks for them) 2) are not productive members of society but want to lecture others on what to do 3) have steady income etc.

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.

I'm capable of anything, my imagination can give me wings

An honest person will never commit criminal acts, but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts.

We unwittingly amplify commonalities with friends, dissimilarities with strangers, and contrasts with enemies.

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

I once procrastinated and kept delaying a spinal cord operation as a response to a back injury — and was completely cured of the back problem after a hiking vacation in the Alps, followed by weight-lifting sessions. These psychologists and economists want me to kill my naturalistic instinct (the inner b****t detector) that allowed me to delay the elective operation and minimize the risks — an insult to the antifragility of our bodies.

A theory is like medicine or government: often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving and, on occasion, lethal. It needs to be used with care, moderation and close adult supervision.

many people mistaken for entrepreneurs fail to have true skin in the game in the sense that their aim is to either cash out by selling the company they helped create to someone else, or “go public” by issuing shares in the stock market. The true value of the company, what it makes, and its long-term survival are of small relevance to them. This is a pure financing scheme and we will exclude this class of people from our “entrepreneur” risk-taker class (this form of entrepreneurship is the equivalent of bringing great-looking and marketable children into the world with the sole aim of selling them at age four). We can easily identify them by their ability to write a convincing business plan.

"Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion.

This does not necessarily mean he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will can an epistemocracy."

Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems.

Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it.