Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

[A]ge is beauty. ...[M]y instinct is to value distilled thought over newer thinking, regardless of its apparent sophistication—another reason to accumulate the hoary volumes by my bedside... For an idea to have survived so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. ...[P]rogress means that some new information is better than past information, not that the average of new information will supplant past information...

[H]istory cannot lend itself to experimentation. But... is potent enough... to eventually bury the bad guy. Bad trades catch up with you... Mathematicians of probability give that a... name: . [R]oughly... properties of a very... long sample path would be similar to the Monte Carlo properties of an average of shorter ones. ...Those unlucky... in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool... would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each ...would revert to his long-term properties.

A... vicious effect of... is that those that are good at predicting the past... think of themselves as good at predicting the future... [W]e live in a world where important events are not predictable...

I have two ways of learning from history: from the past, by reading the elders; and from the future, thanks to my Monte Carlo toy.

My models showed that ultimately almost nobody really survived; bears dropped like flies in the rally and bulls ended up being slaughtered... But there was one exception... option buyers... could buy the insurance against blowup...

In the early 1990s... I became addicted to the various Monte Carlo engines, which I taught myself to build... The dividend of the computer revolution... did not come in... e-mail messages and... chat rooms; it was in the sudden availability of fast processors capable of generating a million sample paths per minute.

From the standpoint of an institution, the existence of a risk manager has less to do with actual risk reduction than it has to do with the impression of risk reduction.

[T]he mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward the sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news.

I do not dispute that arguments should be simplified to their maximum... but people often confuse complex ideas that cannot be simplified into a media-friendly statement as symptomatic of a confused mind. ...MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify... beyond... requirement. (...I am myself the unhappy holder of the degree.)

Mixing forecast and prophecy is symptomatic of randomness-foolishness...

[T]he epic poet did not judge heroes by the result... their fate depended on totally external forces... Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.

Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality.

Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category.

Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.

Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.