Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.

Envy, like thirst for revenge, is the wicked person's version of our natural sense of injustice.

Clearly, an open mind is a necessity when dealing with randomness. Popper believed that any idea of Utopia is necessarily closed owing to the fact that it chokes its own refutations. The simple notion of a good model for society that cannot be left open for falsification is totalitarian. I learned from Popper, in addition to the difference between an open and a closed society, that between an open and a closed mind.

In the medical and social domains, treatment should never be equivalent to silencing symptoms.

In the complex world, the notion of “cause” itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined — another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things.

Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do — except, of course, when we think about it.

Never call someone an imbecile (or fucking idiot) unless he causes harm to others/system; there must be a moral dimension to insults.

Socialism, def: a political system where decisions are made by people with advanced degrees in social "science".

When I went to finance, I discovered that those who *tawk* about money were the ones who didn't have it, couldn't make it, or wanted a lot more but couldn't get it. Same problem with IQ. Those who insist on measuring IQ are ... the most stupid.

Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.

It is good to not feel envy; but better to neither envy nor be envied.

The more complex the world, the less you can grasp it from academic studies.

To explain LOCALISM: On August 6, 1806, the Holy Roman Empire was abolished. Goethe noted that day that the people staying in the same inn as him were far more interested in the quarrel between their coachman and the innkeeper than in its demise.

Fascism does not necessarily come from the nominal government, but from he who controls information.

The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means — crucially — a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them — and do them well. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.