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Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: September 11
Author
Economist
Essayist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Statistician
University Teacher
Writer
Nassim Nicholas Najib Taleb
Nassim Taleb
Tables
Measure
Using
Confidence
Wittgenstein
Unless
Reliability
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Ruler
Also
Rulers
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Table

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Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
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Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.
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Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
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Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.
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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them nerdiness the reverse
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If you let markets - in general, my belief is that if you let markets give you information, they'll give you the information rather than artificially prop up everything.
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The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started in the investment business (in place of going to dental school), rather than on their ability to produce profits.
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You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.
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It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.
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We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.
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The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
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The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.
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Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.
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What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment.
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Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it's closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.
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Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum
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The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.
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We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options ... I am an options trader, and I don't understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them?
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If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
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I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or incentives for skill.
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