Quotes About Risk

The difference between a trader and an investor lies in the duration of the bet, and the corresponding size. There

it is not so easy to "falsify," i.e., to state that something is wrong with full certainty. Imperfections

Mine was the only job you could do if you thought of yourself as risk-hating, risk-aware, and highly ignorant.

people overreact to low-probability outcomes when you discuss the event with them, when you make them aware of it. If

A doctor is pushed by the system to transfer risk from himself to you, and from the present into the future, or from the immediate future into a more distant future.

They game the system while citizens pay the price. At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.

The policies we need to make decisions on should depend far more on the range of possible outcomes than on the expected final number. I

Hire the successful trader, conditional on a solid track record, whose details you can understand the least.

we are effectively not skilled at intuitively gauging the impact of the improbable, such

It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we don't know; everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention.

It happens that uncertainty, disorder, and the unknown are completely equivalent in their effect: antifragile systems benefit (to some degree) from, and the fragile is penalized by, almost all of them—even if you have to find them in separate buildings of the university campuses and some philosophaster who has never taken real risks in his life, or, worse, never had a life, would inform you that "they are clearly not the same thing.

The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

Simply, humans should not be given explosive toys (like atomic bombs, financial derivatives, or tools to create life).

from increasing the number of people in the "tails," that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own, those endowed with

The consequences are not trivial: It means that rational thinking has little, very little, to do with risk avoidance. Much of what rational thinking seems to do is rationalize one's actions by fitting some logic to them.

studying courage in textbooks doesn't make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine.

it is about the distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: if you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks— not let others pay the price of your mistakes. If you inflict risk onto others and they are harmed, you need to pay some price for it.

If you engage in a Black Swan–dependent activity, it is better to be part of a group.

In a textbook case of naive empiricism, the author also looked for traits these millionaires had in common and figured out that they shared a taste for risk taking. Clearly risk taking is necessary for large success—but it is also necessary for failure. Had the author done the same study on bankrupt citizens he would certainly have found a predilection for risk taking.

If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

These traders lose money frequently, but in small amounts, and make money rarely, but in large amounts. I call them crisis hunters. I am happy to be one of them.

the more lethal the risks, the less visible they will be, since the severely victimized are likely to be eliminated from the evidence. The

don't understand?" is, simply, work on the undesirable states of f(x). It is often easier to modify f(x) than to get better knowledge of x. (In other words, robustification rather than forecasting Black Swans.) Example: If I buy an insurance on