Nicholas Nassim Taleb Quotes & Sayings

Beware of precise plans by government. Let government predict: it makes them feel better about themselves and justifies their existence. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell them.
As the great philosopher of uncertainty Yogi berra once said, Don't waste your time trying to fight forecasters, stock analysts, economists and social scientists, except to play pranks on them. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Note that scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people's work and thus cliques are formed of people who quote one another. It's an "I quote you, you quote me" type of business. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future, but that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo we do not know what we will know. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Always remember that, in a modern environment, wars last longer and kill more people than is typically planned. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, retrospective explainability. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don't talk. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

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? — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Don't look for the precise and local. Simply; do not be narrow minded. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Author discussed what he calls the "narrative fallacy." This refers to our "limited ability" to look at a sequence of facts "without weaving an explanation into them. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Our representation of the standard criminal might be based on the properties of those less intelligent ones who were caught. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Seize any opportunity or anything that looks like opportunity. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Being an executive doesn't require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrowing schedules. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

It would appear to a quoting dilettante - i.e., one of those writers and scholars who fill up their texts with phrases from some dead authority - that, as phrased by Hobbes, "from like antecedents flow like consequents." Those who believe in the unconditional benefits of past experience should consider this pearl of wisdom allegedly voiced by a famous ship's captain:
"But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident ... of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort." E. J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS
Titanic Captain Smith's ship sank in 1912 in what became the most talked-about shipwreck in history. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Make a distinction between positive contingencies, and negative. Learn to distinguish between those human undertakings in which a lack of predictability has been extremely beneficial, and those where failure to understand the future has caused harm. — Nicholas Nassim Taleb