Quotes About Taleb

When you don't have debt you don't care about your reputation in economics circles—and somehow it is only when you don't care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just

reality does not have the same closed and symmetric laws and regulations as games.

Needless to say that the ideas of this book fall squarely into the Tragic category: We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws.

matters are far worse: we may have no less of a problem with phony skepticism.

Paradoxically, many government interventions and social policies end up hurting the weak and consolidating the established.

the studious examination of the past in the greatest of detail does not teach you much about the mind of History; it only gives you the illusion of understanding it.

A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies.

naïve empiricism—successions of anecdotes selected to fit a story do not constitute evidence. Anyone

while the statements are dressed up to look as if they were made for the benefit of the collective.

But we don't easily translate this to other domains and remain victims of scientism

options pushed me to study the math of probability.

Popper expuso el mecanismo de las conjeturas y las refutaciones, que funciona como sigue: se formula una conjetura (osada) y se empieza a buscar la observación que demostraría que estamos en un error. Ésta es la alternativa a nuestra búsqueda de casos confirmatorios. Si pensamos que la tarea es fácil, quedaremos decepcionados: pocos seres humanos tienen la habilidad natural de hacerlo.

grammar is something people without anything more exciting to do in their lives codify into a book. While

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

I have had the privilege to work with colleagues who have hidden paranoid disorders that come to the surface on occasion.

antifragility equals more to gain than to lose equals more upside than downside equals asymmetry (favorable) equals likes volatility.

the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data.

Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived "chaos of human experience."*

the lucky surge of interest for reasons completely external to the works themselves.

They may hate McDonald's, but they certainly hate uncertainty even more.

that there is no evidence of the possibility of large events, i.e., Black Swans. You are likely to confuse that statement, however, particularly if you do not pay close attention, with the statement that there is evidence of no possible Black

they would not buy my ideas on robust risk management because "everyone uses these textbooks.

I prefer to use stories and vignettes to illustrate our gullibility about stories and our preference for the dangerous compression of narratives.*

The first of the problems of human nature that we examine in this section, the one just illustrated above, is what I call the narrative fallacy.