Nassim Nicholas Quotes & Sayings

What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in light of the information available until that point — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

between one-third and one-half of all marriages fail, — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Is often a good career move for an author. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

do not use this argument to avoid trying to learn from history. All I am saying is that it is not so simple; be suspicious of the "because" and handle it with care - particularly in situations where you suspect silent evidence. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

in Ovid, difficulty is what wakes up the genius (ingenium mala saepe movent), — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This lack of translation is a mental handicap that comes with being a human; and we will only start to attain wisdom or rationality when we make an effort to overcome and break through it. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it - books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one's profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one's impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Luck is the grand equalizer. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

My principle activity is to tease those who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If you're going to fail, you'd rather fail early than fail late in general. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic." Statistics stay silent in us. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

...avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

At the end, what matters is the strength of the string - not the wealth and power of the dining party. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

(J)ust as we tend to underestimate the role of luck in life in general, we tend to overestimate it in games of chance. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I then completely gave up reading newspapers and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of time (say one hour or more a day, enough time to read more than a hundred additional books per year, which, after a couple of decades, starts mounting). — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

With a Latin saying that sophistication is born out of hunger (artificia docuit fames). — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

More data means more information, but it also means more false information. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Light control works; close control leads to overreaction, sometimes causing the machinery to break into pieces. In a famous paper "On Governors," published in 1867, Maxwell modeled the behavior and showed mathematically that tightly controlling the speed of engines leads to instability. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references "money" in his conversation. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

had no name for the color blue but managed rather well without it - we stayed for a long part of our history culturally, not biologically, color blind. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can walk the walk. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent ... Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George
W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

awareness of a problem does not mean much - particularly when you have special interests and self-serving institutions in play. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Things always become obvious after the fact — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We live to produce information, or improve on it. Nietzsche had the Latin pun aut liberi, aut libri - either children or books, both information that caries through the centuries ... I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books, - my information, that is, my genes, the anti-fragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me. Then say goodbye, have a nice funeral in St. Sergius (Mar Sarkis) in Amioun, and, as the French say, place aux autres - make room for others (p. 370-371). — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly. — Nassim Nicholas 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

If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.' — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion.
This does not necessarily mean he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will can an epistemocracy. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

Remember that you are a Black Swan. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results - or those heroes who focus on process rather than results. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

[T]he worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a bit deeper. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A good rule of thumb is as follows: If the numbers come from somebody wearing a tie (Wall Street economist or analyst, industry public relations department, captive think tank academic and so on), you ought to be very skeptical. By design messages from these people are intended to move markets, move merchandise and/or move public policy and are not a comment on the state of the physical universe. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The model was right, it worked well, but the game turned out to be a different one than anticipated. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The answer is that there are two varieties of rare events: a) the narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and b) those nobody talks about, since they escape models - those that you would feel ashamed discussing in public because they do not seem plausible. I — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Beyond our perceptional distortions, there is a problem with logic itself. How can someone have no clue yet be able to hold a set of perfectly sound and coherent viewpoints that match the observations and abide by every single possible rule of logic? Consider that two people can hold incompatible beliefs based on the exact same data. Does this mean that there are possible families of explanations and that each of these can be equally perfect and sound? Certainly not. One may have a million ways to explain things, but the true explanation is unique, whether or not it is within our reach. — Nassim Nicholas 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

(The error in reasoning is a bit from wishful thinking, because education is considered "good"; I wonder why people don't make the epiphenomenal association between the wealth of a country and something "bad," say, decadence, and infer that decadence, or some other disease of wealth like a high suicide rate, also generates wealth.) — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The only condition for such brand of more sophisticated rationalism: to believe and act as if one does not have the full story - to be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Dress your best on your execution day. Be extremely courteous to your assistant when you lose money. Try not to blame others for your fate, even if they deserve blame. Never exhibit any self-pity. Do not complain. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You find peace by coming to terms with what you don't know. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it). Owing to this misunderstanding of the causal chains between policy and actions, we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance-like a child playing with a chemistry kit. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We said that mere judgment would probably suffice in a primitive society. It is easy for a society to live without mathematics - — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter
it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The next time someone pesters you with unneeded advice, gently remind him of the fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited (and moralizing) advice. It works as a short-term cure. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The hippocampus is the structure where memory is supposedly controlled. It is the most plastic part of the brain; it is also the part that is assumed to absorb all the damage from repeated insults like the chronic stress we experience daily from small doses of negative feelings - as opposed to the invigorating "good stress" of the tiger popping up occasionally in your living room. You can rationalize all you want; the hippocampus takes the insult of chronic stress seriously, incurring irreversible atrophy. Contrary to popular belief, these small, seemingly harmless stressors do not strengthen you; they can amputate part of your self. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started in the investment business (in place of going to dental school), rather than on their ability to produce profits. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Companies trying to misrepresent the product they sell by playing with our cognitive biases, our unconscious associations, and that's sneaky. The latter is done by, say, showing a poetic picture of a sunset with a cowboy smoking and forcing an association between great romantic moments and some given product that, logically, has no possible connection to it. You seek a romantic moment and what you get is cancer. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

my antidote to Black Swans is precisely to be noncommoditized in my thinking. But — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb