Nassim nicholas taleb quotes

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free

There are systems that use failure as fuel for improvement, where the cost of failure is small.

What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.

Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.

The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.

Remember that you are a Black Swan.

The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.

Stoicism is about the *domestication* of emotions, not their elimination.

Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.

In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

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.

Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network.

Only the autodidacts are free.

They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called "work" in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking "outside the box"; and when they die they are put in a box.

We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.

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

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

Things always become obvious after the fact

Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that.

By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.

It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.

Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act - if you can't control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

Don't aim to be perfect! Aim to be antifragile

What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.

Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense

An ad hominem attack against an individual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.

Someone who says "I am busy" is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.

They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.

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.

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.

Don't disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don't understand their logic. Don't pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific 'evidence'.

Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.

Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.

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.

Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it's closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.

Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.

You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist

Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.

If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull - you don't even know how many sides the dice have!

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

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.

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.

The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .

To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.

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

Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality - without exploiting them for fun and profit

The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.

Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.

Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.

Love without sacrifice is like theft

Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad - at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.

Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up

Paul Krugman is a danger to society!

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.

You find peace by coming to terms with what you don't know.

You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.

To bankrupt a fool, give him information.

Learn to fail with pride - and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error - by mastering the error part.

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide.

Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability.

A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.

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.

...maximize the serendipity around you.

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.

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.

When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.

Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically - while bankers strike it rich.

You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative.

For the robust, an error is information.

You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

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

Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.

A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

Anything that provides you with very, very stable income, very stable conditions, maybe generally stable, that often, it masks real risks, risks of blow-ups.

The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

What I learned on my own I still remember

They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)

An option hides where we don't want it to hide.

The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

If you don't feel that you haven't read enough, you haven't read enough.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile.

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.

The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

You need a story to displace a story.

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

You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system.

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

Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.

The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.

The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.