Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

One general, Fabius Maximus was nicknamed Cunctator, "the Procrastinator." He drove Hannibal, who had an obvious military superiority, crazy by avoiding and delaying engagement.

I write only if I feel like it and only on a subject I feel like writing about—and the reader is no fool.

We practitioners and quants aren't too fazed by remarks on the part of academics—it would be like prostitutes listening to technical commentary by nuns.

If the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit.

Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept. However

A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion—in

We do not realize the full extent of the difference between near and far futures. Yet

In a few decades will we look upon the Nobel economics committee with the same smirk as when we look at the respected "scientific" establishments of the Middle Ages that promoted (against all observational evidence) the idea that the heart  was a center of heat? We have been getting things wrong in the past and we laugh at our past institutions; it is time to figure out that we should avoid enshrining the present ones.

The "persecution" of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon of local gods than the reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, not the Greco-Roman one.

The market is like a large movie theater with a small door.

The Pyrrhonian skeptics were docile citizens who followed customs and traditions whenever possible, but taught themselves to systematically doubt everything, and thus attain a level of serenity. But while conservative in their habits, they were rabid in their fight against dogma.

Every time you use a coffeemaker for your morning cappuccino, you are benefiting from the fragility of the coffeemaking entrepreneur who failed. He failed in order to help put the superior merchandise on your kitchen counter.

We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day

Those who use foul language on social networks (such as Twitter) are sending an expensive signal that they are free—and, ironically, competent. You don't signal competence if you don't take risks for it—there are few such low-risk strategies. So cursing today is a status symbol, just as oligarchs in Moscow wear blue jeans at special events to signal their power.

Black Swans and tail events run the socioeconomic world

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant, the opposite.

Author discussed what he calls the narrative fallacy. This refers to our limited ability to look at a sequence of facts without weaving an explanation into them.

We are social animals; hell is other people.

Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, retrospective explainability.

There is this error of thinking that things always have a reason that is accessible to us—that we can comprehend easily.

at any point in time, the richest traders are often the worst traders. This, I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those that are best fit to the latest cycle. This does not happen too often with dentists or pianists—because these professions are more immune to randomness.

In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information.

Statin drugs are meant to lower cholesterol in your blood. But there is an asymmetry, and a severe one. One needs to treat fifty high risk persons for five years to avoid a single cardiovascular event. Statins can potentially harm people who are not very sick, for whom the benefits are either minimal or totally nonexistent.

Finally, I reckon that I am not immune to such an emotional defect. But I deal with it by having no access to information, except in rare circumstances. Again, I prefer to read poetry. If an event is important enough, it will find its way to my ears. I will return to this point in time.