Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes - page 11

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Ideas come and go, stories stay. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms. View quote
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. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In the United States large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
[T]he epic poet did not judge heroes by the result... their fate depended on totally external forces... Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
[T]he mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward the sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My models showed that ultimately almost nobody really survived; bears dropped like flies in the rally and bulls ended up being slaughtered... But there was one exception... option buyers... could buy the insurance against blowup... (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
[H]istory cannot lend itself to experimentation. But... is potent enough... to eventually bury the bad guy. Bad trades catch up with you... Mathematicians of probability give that a... name: ergodicity. [R]oughly... properties of a very... long sample path would be similar to the Monte Carlo properties of an average of shorter ones. ...Those unlucky... in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool... would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each ...would revert to his long-term properties. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I... found a significant advantage in selecting aged traders, using as a selection criterion their cumulative years of experience rather than their absolute success... [O]lder people have been exposed longer to the rare event and can be, convincingly, more resistant to it. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A trader's mental construction should direct him to do precisely what other people do not do. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
[T]hey share the traits of the acute successful randomness fool who, in addition, operates in the most random of environments. ...[T]heir bosses and employers shared the same trait. They, too, are permanently out of the market. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I have organized my career and business in such a way as to... benefit... I am profiting from the rare event, with asymmetric bets. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sometimes market data becomes a simple trap; it shows you the opposite of its nature... [e.g.,] Currencies that exhibit the largest historical stability... are the most prone to crashes. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
[T]here is a category of traders who have inverse rare events, for whom volatility is often the bearer of good news. Those traders lose money frequently, but in small amounts, and make money rarely, but in large amounts. ...crisis hunters. I am happy to be one of them. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Science had shifted, thanks to Bacon, into an emphasis on empirical observation. The problem is that, without a proper method, empirical observations can lead you astray. Hume came to... stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge... epistemology... Hume is the first modern epistemologist... he was an obsessive skeptic and never believed... that a link between two items could be established as being causal. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What is easier to remember, a collection of facts glued together, or a story, something that offers a series of logical links? Causality is easier to commit to memory. ...What is induction exactly? ...It is very handy, as the general takes much less room in onel's memory than a collection of particulars. The effect of such compression is the reduction in the degree of detected randomness. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
[B]ecoming more rational, or not feeling the emotions of social slights, is not part of the human race... not with our current biology. There is no solace to be found from reasoning... (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
The information that a person derived some profit in the past... by itself, is neither meaningful nor relevant. We need to know the size of the population from which he came. If the initial population is 10,000 managers, I would ignore the results. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
[I]t is about distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price for your mistakes. ...If you give an opinion and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What we saw worldwide from 2014 to 2018, from India to the U.K. to the U.S., was a rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy League, Oxford-Cambridge or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think, and... 5) whom to vote for. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb