Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes Page 10
Books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Best 303 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Page 10 of 11
The Black Swan Quotes
“Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.”
“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there.”
“The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right.”
“The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history.”
“The next time someone pesters you with unneeded advice, gently remind him of the fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited (and moralizing) advice. It works as a short-term cure.”
“The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds....”
“The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know.”
“The world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.”
“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories.
Those who react with 'Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?' and the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.”
“This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can’t know) is the central idea of uncertainty.”
“We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.”
“We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results — or those heroes who focus on process rather than results.”
“We grossly overestimate the length of the effect of misfortune on our lives. You think that the loss of your fortune or current position will be devastating, but you are probably wrong. More likely, you will adapt to anything, as you probably did after past misfortunes.”
“We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness.”
Products by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“We tend to use knowledge as therapy.”
“When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.”
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“If you want to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior...you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.”
“When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people's opinion, freer, more real.”
“You become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, focus on analyzing the speaker not the message, and you’ll win the argument.
An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.”
“You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can walk the walk.”
“You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read.
If I have to go after what I call the narrative disciplines, my best tool is a narrative. Ideas come and go, stories stay.”
Twitter post Quotes
“Elon Musk illustrates my 'Fooled by Randomness' point: solid financial success is largely the result of skills, hard work, and wisdom. But wild success (in the far tail) is more likely to be the result of reckless betting, extreme luck, & the opposite of wisdom: folly.”
“Everything before the 'but' is meant to be ignored by the speaker; and everything after the 'but' should be ignored by the listener.”
“I still don't know what lead to 'success'.
But I know what leads to insuccess: a temperament of complaint, the mentality of permanent victimhood, and the collective and individual propensity for lamentation.”
“If someone needs to convince you (or, worse, bully you, or, worse, threaten you) that it is a good investment/tool/product, it is not a good investment/tool/product.”
“If you cause people to doubt you, then prove them wrong, they will trust you forever.”
“Miami in one word: Dionysian.”
“No currency is to devalue until the central banker announces that there will be no devaluation.”
“No rumour is true until officially denied.”
Products by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“So looks like
1- Bitcoin is no hedge for adversity
2- Bitcoin is no hedge for inflation
3- Bitcoin is no hedge for deflation
4- Bitcoin is no currency
5- Bitcoin is nothing”
“The world is split between those who don't know how to start making money and those who don't know when to stop.”
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“Fluctuations in economic welfare are as unfailing as the earth's revolution.”
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