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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
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Economist
Essayist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Statistician
University Teacher
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Nassim Nicholas Najib Taleb
Nassim Taleb
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We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
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There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.
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My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.
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Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.
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You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system.
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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.
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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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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any.
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What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment.
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When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
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You never win an argument until they attack your person.
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Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.
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Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science.
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