Quotes About Decision-making

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

One needs to be intelligent in recognizing the favorable outcome and knowing what to discard.

And one needs to be rational in not making trial and error completely random.

Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse).

Someone with optionality—the right to pick and choose his story—is only reporting on what suits his purpose.

In the end this is a trivial decision making rule: I am very aggressive when I can gain exposure to positive Black Swans -- when a failure would be of small moment -- and very conservative when I am under threat from a negative Black Swan. I am very aggressive when an error in a model can benefit me, and paranoid when an error can hurt.

And numerical prediction leads people to take more risks.

there was no way to convince the management otherwise.

Who is this book written for?

As the great game theorist Ariel Rubinstein holds: do your theories or mathematical representations, don't tell people in the real world how to apply them. Let those with skin in the game select what they need.

Theory should stay independent from practice and vice versa—and we should not extract academic economists from their campuses and put them in positions of decision making.

The more uncertainty, the more role for optionality to kick in, and the more you will outperform.

Political parties are hierarchical, they are designed in a way to substitute someone's own decision making with a well-defined protocol.

o acesso a dados aumenta a intervenção, fazendo com que nos comportemos como o sujeito neurótico.

and I should base my decisions around that.

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

or "what are the ten best books

They would prefer a defective forecast to nothing.

this avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe.

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

companies foolishly believed that all they needed was to win the majority. No, you idiots.

which does not require knowledge or intelligence, merely rationality in choice.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

they make sure that the costs of being wrong are limited (and their probability is not derived from past data).