Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

“A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.”

“Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.”

“Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries,”

“Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests', as a politician would say.

On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.”

“Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do — except, of course, when we think about it.”

“History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between.

Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.”

“History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.”

“Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it.

The trick is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners. It is much easier to signal self-confidence if you are exceedingly polite and friendly; you can control people without having to offend their sensitivity.”

“Hunger (or episodic energy deficit) strengthens the body and the immune system and helps rejuvenate brain cells, weaken cancer cells, and prevent diabetes.”

“I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst – those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians.

Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalin or during the Vietnam War.

Even priests don't go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor's. But we stop by the offices of many pseudoscientists and 'experts' without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel, though...”

“I don’t run for trains. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it!

Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.

You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.”

“I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don’t know what that event will be.”

“I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs.

Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions; nudge System 1 (the heuristic or experiential system) out of the important ones. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical.

This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being.”

“I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.”

“Ideas come and go, stories stay.”

“If you hear a 'prominent' economist using the word 'equilibrium', or 'normal distribution', do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.”

“If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.”

“If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life.”

“Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it.

So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth — remember that you are a Black Swan.”

“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”

“It is my great hope someday to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect.”

“It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.”

“Just as we tend to underestimate the role of luck in life in general, we tend to overestimate it in games of chance.”

“Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others.”

“Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule?

Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan?”

“Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembered the event, and without realizing it, change the story at every subsequent remembrance.”

“One useful trick, I discovered, is to avoid listening to the question of the interviewer, and answer with whatever I have been thinking about recently.

Remarkably, neither the interviewers nor the public notices the absence of correlation between question and answer.”

“Our human race is affected by a chronic underestimation of the possibility of the future straying from the course initially envisioned (in addition to other biases that sometimes exert a compounding effect).

To take an obvious example, think about how many people divorce. Almost all of them are acquainted with the statistic that between one-third and one-half of all marriages fail, something the parties involved did not forecast while tying the knot.

Of course, 'not us', because 'we get along so well' (as if others tying the knot got along poorly).”

“Pasteur said, like all great discoverers, he knew something about accidental discoveries. The best way to get maximal exposure is to keep researching. Collect opportunities.”

“Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.”