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

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I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.
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The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
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My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism
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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!
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Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.
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Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
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Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.
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Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.
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The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
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Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.
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Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
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Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.
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You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.
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What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.
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It's harder to say 'no' when you really mean it.
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The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.
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You get pseudo-order when you seek order you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.
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It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
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