782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse. Hence, laws come and go; ethics stay.

... to figure out why ethics, moral obligations, and skills cannot be easily separable in real life, consider the following when you tell someone in a position of responsibility, say your bookkeeper, "I trust you." Do you mean that one you trust his ethics?

... it is hard to disentangle ethics on one hand, from knowledge and competence on the other ...

Don't tell me what you think: just tell me what's in your portfolio.

... it is about the 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 of your mistakes. If you inflict risk onto others and they are harmed, you need to pay some price for it.

The best slave is someone who is overpaid and he knows it

The best slave is someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status.

Under opacity and in the newfound complexity of the world, people can hide risks and hurt others, with the law incapable of catching them. Iatrogenics has both delayed and invisible consequences. It is hard to see causal links, to fully understand what’s going on. Under such epistemic limitations, skin in the game is the only true mitigator of fragility.