Nassim Taleb > Quotes

“We like stories, we like to summarize, and we like to simplify, i.e., to reduce the dimensions of matters…the narrative fallacy is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our mental representation of the world… fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or…forcing a logical link…explanations bind facts together. They make them more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.”
― Nassim Taleb

“The person you're most afraid to contradict is yourself.”
― Nassim Taleb

“The problem with the idea of learning from one's mistake is that most of what people call mistakes aren't mistakes .”
― Nassim Taleb

“True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind”
― Nassim Taleb

“Too many academics are essentially lecturing birds on how to fly.”
― Nassim Taleb

“Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the “victims” of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather.”
― Nassim Taleb

“Your brain is most intelligent when you don't instruct it on what to do - something people who take showers discover on occasion.”
― Nassim Taleb

“Self directed scholarship has an aesthetic dimension. For a long time I had on the wall of my study the following quote by Jacques Le Goff, the great French medievalist, who believes that the Renaissance came out of independent humanists, not professional scholars. He examined the striking contrast in period paintings, drawings and renditions that compare Medieval university members and humanists:

“One is a professor surrounded and besieged by huddled students. The other is a solitary scholar, sitting in the tranquility and privacy of his chambers, at ease in the spacious and comfy room where his thoughts can move freely. Here we encounter the tumult of schools, the dust of classrooms, the indifference to beauty in collective workplaces,There, it is all order and beauty,Luxe, calme et volupté”
― Nassim Taleb

“You should be much more ashamed of things you didn't say than you are of things you said.”
― Nassim Taleb

“We see the world as less random than it actually is.”
― Nassim Taleb

“At the Harvard Symposium for Hard Problems in Social Science , Emily Oster
presented a very simple, elementary problem: almost all people with type-2
diabetes who are overweight can be cured by losing a little bit of weight. They are
made aware of it, yet they usually gain weight a�er diagnosis (she mentioned
"Atkins" among the options, so it was not just AMA low-fat.). It is so obvious that
we know what to do yet do not carry the action because thinking can be largely
ornamental. The proof of the sterility of (a significant class of) knowledgesterility of (a significant class of) knowledge was right
there (among the obvious evidence that the population has been gaining weight in
spire of technological and educational progress). Yet the others social scientists
kept exalting the value of "education" in spite of this simple devastating evidence.
Someone even suggested teaching more "critical thinking". This is the great sucker
problem: people who teach truly think that teaching, or, worse, preaching, cures.”
― Nassim Taleb

“Un hombre es honorable en proporción a los riesgos personales que asume por sus opiniones”
― Nassim Taleb

“Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best.”
― Nassim Taleb

“This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.”
― Nassim Taleb

“If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.”
― Nassim Taleb

“What I learned on my own I still remember”
― Nassim Taleb

“The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!”
― Nassim Taleb