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
Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes about
political suffering imbeciles
The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it
certificates threat impotence
A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.
intelligent men half
The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.
hate hate-me ifs
If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.
wall moving thinking
A good rule of thumb is as follows: If the numbers come from somebody wearing a tie (Wall Street economist or analyst, industry public relations department, captive think tank academic and so on), you ought to be very skeptical. By design messages from these people are intended to move markets, move merchandise and/or move public policy and are not a comment on the state of the physical universe.
ties advice
Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.
long feelings guilt
You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.
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.
tails crash rationalism
Rationalism crashes in the tails.
persons
The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.
odds risk investing
If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull - you don't even know how many sides the dice have!
investing leap
History doesn't crawl; it leaps.
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.
distance relevant sensational
Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.