Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes Page 2

“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.”

“I feel anger and frustration when I think that one in ten Americans beyond the age of high school is on some kind of antidepressant, such as Prozac. Indeed, when you go through mood swings, you now have to justify why you are not on some medication.

There may be a few good reasons to be on medication, in severely pathological cases, but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence – perhaps even the first source.

I get mellow and lose physical energy when it rains, become more meditative, and tend to write more and more slowly then, with the raindrops hitting the window, what Verlaine called autumnal 'sobs' (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks huzun (from the Arabic word for sadness).

Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy – and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile?”

“I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.”

“I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.”

“If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own.

Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.”

“If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it.

It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.”

“It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life — with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.”

“It is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one.”

“Keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.”

“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.”

“Let us say that, in general, failure (and disconfirmation) are more informative than success and confirmation, which is why I claim that negative knowledge is just 'more robust'.”

“Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant.

Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure.”

“Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.”

“More data — such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street — can make you miss the big truck.”

“More data means more information, but it also means more false information.”

“Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated — the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.”

“Much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.”

“My dear Socrates, you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions.

You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble.

You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.”

“Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have — or don’t have — in their portfolio.”

“Never listen to a leftist who does not give away his fortune or does not live the exact lifestyle he wants others to follow.

What the French call 'the caviar left', la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists, are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political system with sumptuary limitations, while overtly leading a lavish lifestyle, often financed by inheritance — not realizing the contradiction that they want others to avoid just such a lifestyle.

It is not too different from the womanizing popes, such as John XII, or the Borgias. The contradiction can exceed the ludicrous as with French president François Mitterrand of France who, coming in on a socialist platform, emulated the pomp of French monarchs.

Even more ironic, his traditional archenemy, the conservative General de Gaulle, led a life of old-style austerity and had his wife sew his socks.”

“Never trust the words of a man who is not free.”

“Note another element of Switzerland: it is perhaps the most successful country in history, yet it has traditionally had a very low level of university education compared to the rest of the rich nations.

Its system, even in banking during my days, was based on apprenticeship models, nearly vocational rather than the theoretical ones. In other words, on techne (crafts and know how), not episteme (book knowledge, know what).”

“Only the autodidacts are free.”

“Primitive societies are largely free of cardiovascular disease, cancer, dental cavities, economic theories, lounge music, and other modern ailments.”

“Rational flâneur (or just flâneur): Someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his destination) so he can imbibe things based on new information obtained.

In research and entrepreneurship, being a flâneur is called 'looking for optionality'.”

“Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside.”

“Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses.

Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.”

“So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition — given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily.”

“Some can be more intelligent than others in a structured environment — in fact school has a selection bias as it favors those quicker in such an environment, and like anything competitive, at the expense of performance outside it.

Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings.

Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn't exist outside of ludic — extremely organized — constructs. In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity.

I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings, many of these people were selected for their ability to concentrate on boring material.)

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.”

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.”