He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors — though never the same error mo… - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors — though never the same error more than once — is more reliable than someone who has never made any.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1 January 1960 in Amioun, Lebanon) is an essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance.
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Sarah Josephine Taleb (CC BY)
It took 5 volumes to get the main point: "The main thread is that while there is inordinate uncertainty about what is going on, there is great certainty about what one should do about it."
When you elect a bureaucrat to the presidency, you end up with someone who likes complicating your life with bureaucratic rules. When you elect a real estate dealmaker, you end up with someone who likes to do real-estate deals. Alas, a trade-off. But beats wars.
[A]t any point in time, the richest traders are often the worst traders. This I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time... the most successful traders are likely to be those fit for the latest cycle.
