782 Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.

Normative Economics is like religion without the aesthetics.

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.

For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. Mathematically, progress means that some new information is better than past information, not that the average of new information will supplant past information, which means that it is optimal for someone, when in doubt, to systematically reject the new idea, information, or method. Clearly and shockingly, always. Why?

Mother Nature did not attend high school geometry courses or read the books of Euclid of Alexandria. Her geometry is jagged, but with a logic of its own and one that is easy to understand.

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds...

Transportation didn’t get safer just because people learn from errors, but because the system does. The experience of the system is different from that of individuals; it is grounded in filtering.

What he likes most about proprietary trading is that it requires considerably less time than other high-paying professions; in other words it is perfectly compatible with his non-middle-class work ethic. Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics, Nero believes, draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.

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