782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and how much of their necks they are putting on the line.

Only the autodidacts are free.

People with an engineering-oriented mind will tend to look at everything around as an engineering problem. This is a very good thing in engineering, but when dealing with cats, it is a much better idea to hire veterinarians than circuit engineers…

... you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant

We" are the empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

Things that have worked for a long time are preferable - they are more likely to have reached their ergodic states. At the worst, we don't know how long they'll last.

Clearly, binary outcomes are not very prevalent in life; they mostly exist in laboratory experiments and in research papers. In life, payoffs are usually open-ended, or, at least, variable.

On the left, in the fragile category, the mistakes are rare and large when they occur, hence irreversible; to the right the mistakes are small and benign, even reversible and quickly overcome. They are also rich in information. So a certain system of tinkering and trial and error would have the attributes of antifragility.

Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens—usually.