Quotes About Taleb

aside from deriving conclusions from static measures of inequality—the methods he used were flawed:

Such statements, that other traders had also gotten into trouble, are self-incriminating.

Accept that being human involves some amount of epistemic arrogance in running your affairs. Do not be ashamed of that. Do not try to always withhold judgment—opinions are the stuff of life. Do not try to avoid predicting—yes, after this diatribe about prediction I am not urging you to stop being a fool. Just be a fool in the right places.*

Note a slight disagreement on my part that does not change the story by much: the world, rather, moves by large incremental random changes.

my wish is for people in general to remain fools of randomness (so I can trade against them), yet for there to remain a minority intelligent enough to value my methods and hire my services.

but runs the risk of killing a few, with a net benefit to society.

the "planning fallacy," in which they try to explain the fact that projects take longer, rarely less time, using psychological factors.

In other words, it was a much more linear economy—less complex—than today. And we have more nonlinearities—asymmetries, convexities—in today's world.

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

Lembre-se da assimetria fundamental: o antifrágil beneficia-se com a volatilidade e a desordem; o frágil é prejudicado. Bem, tempo e desordem são a mesma coisa.

I am not saying that for an individual, education is useless: it builds helpful credentials for one's own career—but such effect washes out at the country level.

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative," John Stuart Mill once complained. This problem is chronic: if you tell people that the key to success is not always skills, they think that you are telling them that it is never skills, always luck.

who benefited from a market cycle.

they are explicitly designed to benefit from market volatility.

this was his most significant insight, but it remains his least known.

Tales tinha o direito — mas não a obrigação — de usar as prensas caso houvesse um súbito aumento na demanda; a outra parte tinha a obrigação, mas não o direito. Tales pagou um preço pequeno por esse privilégio, com uma perda limitada e um grande resultado possível. É a primeira opção de que se tem registro. A opção é um agente da antifragilidade.

their role being confined to analysis, not decision making.

to avoid dullness may help to filter out the nonessential.)

Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one's profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one's impulses.

hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

he had already been financially independent

I would be now brainwashed into thinking that uncertainty was something to be found in a casino

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances. If you think the task is easy, you will be disappointed—few humans have a natural ability to do this. I confess that I am not one of them; it does not come naturally to me.fn2

So, "giving advice" as a sales pitch is fundamentally unethical—selling cannot be deemed advice.