Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Talebis a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by the Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II...
NationalityLebanese
ProfessionScientist
CountryLebanon
ideas rare-events swans
The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.
taken differences variables
There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.
want
An option hides where we don't want it to hide.
independent people benefits
I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.
sometimes randomness wells
Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans.
stuck randomness dangerous
When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
academia enough surface
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.
tangible favors embedded
We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
realism skepticism
Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.
academia prostitution
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
winning argument persons
You never win an argument until they attack your person.
confusion
Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
ethics good-things contagious
Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.
expectations pay probability
Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.