Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes Page 6

“It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences.”

“It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.”

“Learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once.”

“Let us return to pathemata mathemata (learning through pain) and consider its reverse: learning through thrills and pleasure. People have two brains, one when there is skin in the game, one when there is none.

Skin in the game can make boring things less boring. When you have skin in the game, dull things like checking the safety of the aircraft because you may be forced to be a passenger in it cease to be boring.

If you are an investor in a company, doing ultra-boring things like reading the footnotes of a financial statement (where the real information is to be found) becomes, well, almost not boring.”

“Life is sacrifice and risk taking, and nothing that doesn't entail some moderate amount of the former, under the constraint of satisfying the latter, is close to what we can call life.

If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure.”

“Making some types of errors is the most rational thing to do, when the errors are of little cost, as they lead to discoveries. For instance, most medical 'discoveries' are accidental to something else. An error-free world would have no penicillin, no chemotherapy, almost no drugs, and most probably no humans.

This is why I have been against the state dictating to us what we 'should' be doing: only evolution knows if the 'wrong' thing is really wrong, provided there is skin in the game to allow for selection.”

“Never engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.”

“No muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without consequence, change without aesthetics, age without values, life without effort, water without thirst, food without nourishment, love without sacrifice, power without fairness, facts without rigor, statistics without logic, mathematics without proof, teaching without experience, politeness without warmth, values without embodiment, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, friendship without investment, virtue without risk, probability without ergodicity, wealth without exposure, complication without depth, fluency without content, decision without asymmetry, science without skepticism, religion without tolerance, and, most of all: nothing without skin in the game.”

“No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.”

“No, businessmen as risk takers are not subjected to the judgment of other businessmen, only to that of their personal accountant.”

“Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason.”

“People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.”

“Scars signal skin in the game.”

“Silver Rule (negative golden rule): Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you.

Note the difference from the Golden Rule, as the silver one prevents busybodies from attempting to run your life.”

“Start by being nice to every person you meet. But if someone tries to exercise power over you, exercise power over him.”

“The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.”

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything,”

“The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse.”

“The only definition of rationality that I’ve found that is practically, empirically, and mathematically rigorous is the following: what is rational is that which allows for survival.

Unlike modern theories by psychosophasters, it maps to the classical way of thinking. Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is, to me, irrational.”

“The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do no harm (primum non nocere); even more, we will argue, those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions.”

“Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse). There is absolutely no benefit for someone in such a position to propose something simple: when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication.

Anyone who has submitted a 'scholarly' paper to a journal knows that you usually raise the odds of acceptance by making it more complicated than necessary. Further, there are side effects for problems that grow nonlinearly with such branching-out complications. Worse: Non-skin-in-the-game people don’t get simplicity.”

“Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk.”

“Unless you are perfectly narcissistic and psychopathic — even then — your worst-case scenario is never limited to the loss of only your life.”

“We have evidence that collectively society doesn’t advance with organized education, rather the reverse: the level of (formal) education in a country is the result of wealth.”

“What matters isn't what a person has or doesn't have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.”

“What you learn from the intensity and the focus you had when under the influence of risk stays with you. You may lose the sharpness, but nobody can take away what you’ve learned.

This is the principal reason I am now fighting the conventional educational system, made by dweebs for dweebs. Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, they would build an instinct to spot its misapplications.”

“Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, it will eventually destroy our world. So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities.

Simply, they violate the Silver Rule. It is not permissible to use 'American values' or 'Western principles' in treating intolerant Salafism (which denies other peoples’ right to have their own religion). The West is currently in the process of committing suicide.”

“You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.”

“You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends severely on the prestige of the school granting it. I remember when I applied to MBA programs being told that anything outside the top ten or twenty would be a waste of time. On the other hand a degree in mathematics is much less dependent on the school.”

“You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.”