Nassim Taleb Black Swan Quotes & Sayings

As Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, writes, "Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information." And even when the information is not false, the problem is "that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack. — Arianna Huffington

And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Bad times make good people, as mountainous pressures make diamonds or as fire tempers steel. — Peter Kreeft

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

There are psychological repercussions to illness and we need a little more help to get through the effects not only on the afflicted but on the family. And I think there's even a place for humor in that. — Alan Thicke

In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

But promoting philosophical skepticism is not quite the mission of this book. If awareness of the Black Swan problem can lead us into withdrawal and extreme skepticism, I take here the exact opposite direction. I am interested in deeds and true empiricism. So, this book was not written by a Sufi mystic, or even by a skeptic in the ancient or medieval sense, or even (we will see) in a philosophical sense, but by a practitioner whose principal aim is not to be a sucker in things that matter, period. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Joseph Stiglitz, with two colleagues, the Orszag brothers (Peter and Jonathan), looked at the very same Fannie Mae. They assessed, in a report, that "on the basis of historical experience, the risk to the government from a potential default on GSE debt is effectively zero."* Supposedly, they ran simulations - but didn't see the obvious. They also said that the probability of a default was found to be "so small that it is difficult to detect." It is statements like these and, to me, only statements like these (intellectual hubris and the illusion of understanding of rare events) that caused the buildup of these exposures to rare events in the economy. This is the Black Swan problem that I was fighting. This is Fukushima. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There's simply no way you can tell a woman you work with that you disapprove of her relationship with her adult child, no matter how much you think it would be better for him to move out. — Mallory Ortberg

He knew that for all his admission of Chaos he would be better able to do what he wished in a world ordered by some degree of Law. The — Michael Moorcock

If you profess to be a Christian, yet find full satisfaction in worldly pleasures and pursuits, your profession is false. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Love has the power to hold the whole universe together. — Debasish Mridha

So the world is much more correlated than we give credit to. And so we see more of what Nassim Taleb calls "black swan events" - rare events happen more often than they should because the world is more correlated. — Richard Thaler

God opens the door so that we can establish His kingdom on earth — Sunday Adelaja

I felt then what I have felt many times since. It is the moment you forget the electricity, the conducting metals and skipping electrons, the tubes and wires and fundamental principles; standing with hands in pockets you forget these things and for a hot, proud instant you think it is you who did this, who made the tubes glow, you clever mouse. — Sean Michaels

The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun. — Al Capone

Hey there, Lissa Daniels," he said. He raised his Coke. "Would you like to say hello to your distant cousin, Jack? — Kody Keplinger

What I do is I come in the morning and get involved in the character, but I'm always very pleased to leave it at night and have my life. — Catherine Deneuve

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

The true hero in the Black Swan world is someone who prevents a calamity and, naturally, because the calamity did not take place, does not get recognition - or a bonus - for it. I will be taking the concept deeper in Book VII, on ethics, about the unfairness of a bonus system and how such unfairness is magnified by complexity. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The narrative fallacy, Bezos explained, was a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan to describe how humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories. — Anonymous

I'm very curious about David Bowie's new record [2016]. I'm very, very ... I'm just incredibly curious, I want to see what's happening with that. I don't really know who else is putting out records, we've had our heads buried working on ours. I haven't really been paying much attention lately. — Patrick Stump

Aside from the movies, examples of positive-Black Swan businesses are: some segments of publishing, scientific research, and venture capital. In these businesses, you lose small to make big. You have little to lose per book and, for completely unexpected reasons, any given book might take off. The downside is small and easily controlled. The problem with publishers, of course, is that they regularly pay up for books, thus making their upside rather limited and their downside monstrous. (If you pay $10 million for a book, your Black Swan is it not being a bestseller.) Likewise, while technology can carry a great payoff, paying for the hyped-up story, as people did with the dot-com bubble, can make any upside limited and any downside huge. It is the venture capitalist who invested in a speculative company and sold his stake to unimaginative investors who is the beneficiary of the Black Swan, not the "me, too" investors. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Forgive me. I thought you were protesting the blood because you didn't want me to bond you to me." "What?" This was something entirely new to consider. "You bonded me to you? As in for life? For all eternity?" "For as long as I live, anyway," Corbin said. "It was the only way to save your life. I had taken too much of your blood - you were dying, Addison." His tone took on a pleading tone. "Please tell me you would not rather be dead than bound to me." "I could ask you to say the same thing," I pointed out. "You were checking out on me without even telling me first." "I didn't think you cared." His deep voice was soft, almost wistful. "Well, I do. I love you, damn it," I said, poking him in the chest again. — Evangeline Anderson

Dad said High Lonesome, as the area was known, wasn't a place for the soft of head or the weak of heart, and he said that was why he and I made out just fine there, because we were both tough nuts. — Jeannette Walls

The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nikki Lamborn has the best female rock voice since Janis Joplin and I know what I'm talking about, I knew Janis. — Roger Daltrey

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