Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I prefer to remain a skeptic. People frequently misinterpret my opinion. I never said that every rich man is an idiot and every unsuccessful person unlucky, only that in absence of much additional information it is preferable to reserve one's judgment. It is safer. Ten • LOSER TAKES ALL—ON THE NONLINEARITIES OF LIFE The nonlinear viciousness of life.

We know with much more clarity what is bad than what is good.

The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now

the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

It contradicts modern methods and ideas of innovation and progress on many levels, as we tend to think that innovation comes from bureaucratic funding, through planning, or by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one Highly Decorated Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (who never innovated anything) or hiring a consultant (who never innovated anything).

top-down is usually irreversible, so mistakes tend to stick, whereas bottom-up is gradual and incremental, with creation and destruction along the way

But simplicity is not so simple to attain. Steve Jobs figured out that "you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple." The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it.

The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse. Laws come and go; ethics stay.

Or, if I have to work, I find it preferable (and less painful) to work intensely for very short hours, then do nothing for the rest of the time (assuming doing nothing is really doing nothing), until I recover completely and look forward to a repetition, rather than being subjected to the tedium of Japanese style low-intensity interminable office hours with sleep deprivation. Main course and dessert are separate.

El lector podrá observar en esta falacia del viaje de ida y vuelta la injusticia de los estereotipos;

By the mechanism of retrospective determinism we will find the "cause"—actually

My problem is that I'm not rational.

Contrary to what people might expect, I am not recommending that

and no less intellectual than Nero.

Now, when you read material by finance professors, finance gurus, or your local bank making investment recommendations based on the long-term returns of the market, beware. Even if their forecasts were true (they aren't), no individual can get the same returns as the market unless he has infinite pockets and no uncle points.

Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.

so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

If you hear a "prominent" economist using the word equilibrium , or normal distribution , do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.

We are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is, bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending members of the I.A.N.D. (International Association of Name Droppers), and academics with too much power and no real downside and/or accountability.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

the most successful businesses are precisely those that know how to work around inherent unpredictability and even exploit it.

Half the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears.

In general, skin in the game comes with conflict of interest.

It was so evident that we needed to remedy the fragmentation between art and science.