m > m's Quotes

“Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes,and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born, and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule?

Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan?”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“What he likes most about proprietary trading is that it requires considerably less time than other high paying professions; in other words it is perfectly compatible with his non-middle-class work ethics. Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy.”
― Fooled By Randomness Nassim Taleb

“More data means more information, but it also means more false information.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Let us say that, in general, failure (and disconfirmation) are more informative than success and confirmation, which is why I claim that negative knowledge is just “more robust.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Clearly, an open mind is a necessity when dealing with randomness. Popper believed that any idea of Utopia is necessarily closed owing to the fact that it chokes its own refutations. The simple notion of a good model for society that cannot be left open for falsification is totalitarian. I learned from Popper, in addition to the difference between an open and a closed society, that between an open and a closed mind.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one's limitations--Scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“It is just that narrative can be lethal when used in the wrong places.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“The narrative fallacy, Bezos explained, was a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan to describe how humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories.”
― Anonymous

“Increasingly, data can only truly deliver via negativa–style knowledge—it can be effectively used to debunk, not confirm.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“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 Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“For if you think that education causes wealth, rather than being a result of wealth, or that intelligent actions and discoveries are the result of intelligent ideas, you will be in for a surprise. Let us see what kind of surprise.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references “money” in his conversation.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“This, perhaps is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one's ego.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Real strength lies in the control or, as Nassim Taleb put it, the domestication of one’s emotions, not in pretending they don’t exist.”
― Anonymous

“Some business bets in which one wins big but infrequently, yet loses small but frequently, are worth making if others are suckers for them and if you have the personal and intellectual stamina.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“in Ovid, difficulty is what wakes up the genius (ingenium mala saepe movent),”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Pure generosity is when you help the ingrate. Every other form is self-serving.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“It seems that it is the most unsuccessful people who give the most advice, particularly for writing and financial matters.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“for Mother Nature, opinions and predictions don’t count; surviving is what matters.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works—we even seem to have evidence against it. A management scholar, William Starbuck, has published a few papers debunking the effectiveness of planning—it makes the corporation option-blind, as it gets locked into a non-opportunistic course of action.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“I have called this mental defect the Lucretius problem, after the Latin poetic philosopher who wrote that the fool believes that the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest one he has observed. We consider the biggest object of any kind that we have seen in our lives or hear about as the largest item that can possibly exist. And we have been doing this for millenia. In Pharaonic Egypt, which happens to be the first complete top-down nation-state managed by bureaucrats, scribes tracked the high-water mark of the Nile and used it as an estimate for a future worst-case scenario.

The same can be seen in the Fukushima nuclear reactor, which experienced a catastrophic failure in 2011 when a tsunami struck. It had been built to withstand the worst past historical earthquake, with the builders not imagining much worse--and not thinking that the worst past event had to be a surprise, as it had no precedent. Likewise, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Fragilista Doctor Alan Greenspan, in his apology to Congress offered the classic "It never happened before." Well, nature, unlike Fragilista Greenspan, prepares for what has not happened before, assuming worse harm is possible.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“There is something like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the collective when people engage in communal dances, mass riots, or war. Your mood is now that of the herd. You are part of what Elias Canetti calls the rhythmic and throbbing crowd”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“We can simplify the relationships between fragility, errors, and antifragility as follows. When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible—for deviations are more harmful than helpful. This is why the fragile needs to be very predictive in its approach, and, conversely, predictive systems cause fragility. When you want deviations, and you don’t care about the possible dispersion of outcomes that the future can bring, since most will be helpful, you are antifragile.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Take the following potent and less-is-more-style argument by the rogue economist Ha-Joon Chang. In 1960 Taiwan had a much lower literacy rate than the Philippines and half the income per person; today Taiwan has ten times the income. At the same time, Korea had a much lower literacy rate than Argentina (which had one of the highest in the world) and about one-fifth the income per person; today it has three times as much. Further, over the same period, sub-Saharan Africa saw markedly increasing literacy rates, accompanied with a decrease in their standard of living. We can multiply the examples (Pritchet’s study is quite thorough), but I wonder why people don’t realize the simple truism, that is, the fooled by randomness effect: mistaking the merely associative for the causal, that is, if rich countries are educated, immediately inferring that education makes a country rich, without even checking. Epiphenomenon here again.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder