Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes Page 3

“Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.”

“Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.”

“That if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office.”

“The best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals.”

“The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations.

Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.”

“The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom. He did not use the notion of the Procrustean bed, but he outlined it perfectly. His argument is that they repress children's natural biophilia, their love of living things.

But the problem is more general; soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children's lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerds – that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity.

As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning. Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all those things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.”

“The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.”

“The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether – when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement.

The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of the pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research.

It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism. Trial and error is freedom.”

“The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.”

“The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.”

“The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money.

The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it get to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.”

“This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.”

“We ingest probiotics because we don’t eat enough 'dirt' anymore.”

“Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.”

“You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.”

“A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in light of the information available until that point.”

“At any point in time, the richest traders are often the worst traders. This, I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those that are best fit to the latest cycle.

This does not happen too often with dentists or pianists — because these professions are more immune to randomness.”

“Bullish or bearish are terms used by people who do not engage in practicing uncertainty, like the television commentators, or those who have no experience in handling risk.

Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration.”

“Clearly, an open mind is a necessity when dealing with randomness. Popper believed that any idea of Utopia is necessarily closed owing to the fact that it chokes its own refutations. The simple notion of a good model for society that cannot be left open for falsification is totalitarian.

I learned from Popper, in addition to the difference between an open and a closed society, that between an open and a closed mind.”

“Common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen. Furthermore, what sounds intelligent in a conversation or a meeting, or, particularly, in the media, is suspicious.”

“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.”

“I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffett, and I certainly do not see point of becoming one if I were to adopt Spartan (even miserly) habits and live in my starter house.”

“I will set aside the point that I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealth (aside from the pleasure of regularly counting the beans).”

“If an event is important enough, it will find its way to my ears.”

“If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?”

“Imagine taking a test knowing the answer. While we know that history flows forward, it is difficult to realize that we envision it backward.

Why is it so? Here is a possible explanation: Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny.

If they were made for us to understand things, then we would have a machine in it that would run the past history as in a VCR, with a correct chronology, and it would slow us down so much that we would have trouble operating.

Psychologists call this overestimation of what one knew at the time of the event due to subsequent information the hindsight bias, the 'I knew it all along' effect.”

“In a few decades will we look upon the Nobel economics committee with the same smirk as when we look at the respected 'scientific' establishments of the Middle Ages that promoted (against all observational evidence) the idea that the heart was a center of heat?

We have been getting things wrong in the past and we laugh at our past institutions; it is time to figure out that we should avoid enshrining the present ones.”

“In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.”

“In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical facts.”

“It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one's limitations.

Scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.”