Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

Aut tace aut loquere meliora silencio (only when the words outperform silence).

Do not socialize with people much richer than you; but if you do, do it in your own territory (restaurants you can afford, wine, etc.)

You do not want to win an argument. You want to win.

Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it's closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.

Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).

anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.

By all means, avoid words — threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!

You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends severely on the prestige of the school granting it. I remember when I applied to MBA programs being told that anything outside the top ten or twenty would be a waste of time. On the other hand a degree in mathematics is much less dependent on the school (conditional on being above a certain level, so the heuristic would apply to the difference between top ten and top two thousand schools). The same applies to research papers. In math and physics, a result posted on the repository site arXiv (with a minimum hurdle) is fine. In low-quality fields like academic finance (where papers are usually some form of complicated storytelling), the “prestige” of the journal is the sole criterion.

There is something nonphilosophical about investing one’s pride and ego into a “my house/ library/ car is bigger than that of others in my category” — it is downright foolish to claim to be first in one’s category all the while sitting on a time bomb.

The classical man’s worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man’s worst fear is just death.

As Yogi Berra said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.

Someone with a high public presence who is controversial and takes risks for his opinion is less likely to be a bullshit vendor.

To establish societal symmetry: The bigotteer needs to be penalized the same as the bigot. The false accuser needs to be penalized as if he committed the crime himself (Hammurabi). etc.

God created Monte Carlo and similar places so extremely rich people would come experience extreme envy.

Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients — and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.