Quotes About Nassim Taleb

This process of applying stress to increase resilience was named antifragility by author and risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The left holds that because markets are stupid models should be smart; the right believes that because models are stupid markets should be smart. Alas, it never hit both sides that both markets and models are very stupid.

an ad hominen attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.

We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don't seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion.

but at least I know that I cannot forecast and a small number of people (those I care about) take that as an asset.

summarize the research in complex systems: Mark Buchanan's Ubiquity, Philip Ball's Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod's Why Most Things Fail. These three authors present the world of social science as full of power laws, a view with which I most certainly agree.

Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules. Add to these tasks the "duty" of attending opera performances

One of the attractive aspects of my profession as a quantitative option trader is that

you never cure structural defects; the system corrects itself by collapsing.*2

who benefited from a market cycle.

absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, a simple point that has the following implications: for the antifragile, good news tends to be absent from past data, and for

Salespeople are experts in the art of psychological manipulation, making the client trade, often against his own interest

Some become antifragile at the expense of others by getting the upside (or gains) from volatility, variations, and disorder and exposing others to the downside risks of losses or harm. And such antifragility-at-the-cost-of-fragility-of-others is hidden

the probability (hence True/False) does not work in the real world; it is the payoff that matters.

the benefits are small, and visible—and the costs very large, delayed, and hidden.