Quote

Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

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
Consequence
Sceptical
Matters
Scepticism
Large
Costly
Small
Imperfect
Better
Aesthetic
Human
Consequences
Humans
Matter
Foolish

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The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference
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The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.
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The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history
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For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
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Things always become obvious after the fact
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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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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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Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.
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The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality - without exploiting them for fun and profit
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What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment.
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Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.
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The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
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Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically - while bankers strike it rich.
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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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Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
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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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We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
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Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.
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Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.
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Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.
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