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Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Books

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“We want to be told stories, and there is nothing wrong with that—except that we should check more thoroughly whether the story provides consequential distortions of reality. Could it be that fiction reveals truth while nonfiction is a harbor for the liar? Could it be that fables and stories are closer to the truth than is the thoroughly fact-checked ABC News? Just consider that the newspapers try to get impeccable facts, but weave them into a narrative in such a way as to convey the impression of causality (and knowledge). There are factcheckers, not intellect-checkers.”

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Author:Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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“Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. Second, unlike a well-defined precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality. One is capable of unwittingly playing Russian roulette - and calling it by some alternative “low risk” game.”

TruthReality Check
Book:Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
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“Everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention. We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some extent); we are a very unfair one.”

TreatmentHeroesFairnessPrevention
Book:The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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“I hesitate to give advice because every major single piece of advice I was given turned out to be wrong and I am glad I didn’t follow them. I was told to focus and I never did. I was told to never procrastinate and I waited 20 years for The Black Swan and it sold 3 million copies. I was told to avoid putting fictional characters in my books and I did put in Nero Tulip and Fat Tony because I got bored otherwise. I was told to not insult the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal; the more I insulted them the nicer they were to me and the more they solicited Op-Eds. I was told to avoid lifting weights for a back pain and became a weightlifter: never had a back problem since. If I had to relive my life I would be even more stubborn and uncompromising than I have been. One should never do anything without skin in the game. If you give advice, you need to be exposed to losses from it.”

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Author:Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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“Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion. This does not necessarily mean he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will can an epistemocracy.”

HumilityConfidenceArroganceHubrisInstrospection
Book:The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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“Life is sacrifice and risk taking, and nothing that doesn't entail some moderate amount of the former, under the constraint of satisfying the latter, is close to what we can call life. If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure.”

LifeRiskSacrificeAdventureHarmRisk Taking
Book:Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
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“Further, the random element in trial and error is not quite random, if it is carried out rationally, using error as a source of information. if every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution - so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course you make discoveries along the way.”

Antifragile
Book:Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
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“We can simplify the relationships between fragility, errors, and anti fragility 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 anti fragile.”

Antifragile
Author:Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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“The symposium was a closed-doors, synod-style assembly of people who would never have mixed otherwise. My first surprise was to discover that the military people there thought, behaved, and acted like philosophers—far more so than the philosophers we will see splitting hairs in their weekly colloquium in Part Three. They thought out of the box, like traders, except much better and without fear of introspection. An assistant secretary of defence was among us, but had I not known his profession I would have thought he was a practitioner of skeptical empiricism. Even an engineering investigator who had examined the cause of a space shuttle explosion was thoughtful and open-minded. I came out of the meeting realising that only military people deal with randomness with genuine, introspective intellectual honesty—unlike academics and corporate executives using other people's money. This does not show in war movies, where they are usually portrayed as war-hungry autocrats. The people in front of me were not the people who initiate wars. Indeed, for many, the successful defence policy is the one that manages to eliminate potential dangers without war, such as the strategy of bankrupting the Russians through the escalation in defence spending. When I expressed my amazement to Laurence, another finance person who was sitting next to me, he told me that the military collected more genuine intellects and risk thinkers than most if not all other professions. Defence people wanted to understand the epistemology of risk.”

RiskMilitaryArmyUncertaintyDefenceRisk Management
Book:The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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“Bullish or bearish are terms used by people who do not engage in practicing uncertainty, like the television commentators, or those who have no experience in handling risk. Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration.”

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Book:Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
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“...my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism...many philistines reduce my ideas to an opposition of technology when in fact I am opposing the naive blindness to it's side affects - the fragility criterion. I'd rather be unconditional about ethical and conditional about technology than the the reverse.”

NerdModernityFragilityClarity Of ThoughtNerdsInternet AddictionNerdinessModernity Is A SicknessRobustnessModern ValuesWisdom Vs Nerdiness
Book:The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
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“Many people confuse the statement “almost all terrorists are Moslems” with “almost all Moslems are terrorists.” Assume that the first statement is true, that 99 percent of terrorists are Moslems. This would mean that only about .001 percent of Moslems are terrorists, since there are more than one billion Moslems and only, say, ten thousand terrorists, one in a hundred thousand. So the logical mistake makes you (unconsciously) overestimate the odds of a randomly drawn individual Moslem person (between the age of, say, fifteen and fifty) being a terrorist by close to fifty thousand times! [...]Our inferential machinery, that which we use in daily life, is not made for a complicated environment in which a statement changes markedly when its wording is slightly modified. Consider that in a primitive environment there is no consequential difference between the statements "most killers are wild animals" and "most wild animals are killers". There is an error here, but it is almost inconsequential. Our statistical intuitions have not evolved for a habitat in which these subtleties can make a big difference.”

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Author:Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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“HISTORY AND THE TRIPLET OF OPACITY History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what's inside the box, how the mechanisms work. What I call the generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds. You are very likely to be fooled about their intentions. This disconnect is similar to the difference between the food you see on the table at the restaurant and the process you can observe in the kitchen. (The last time I brunched at a certain Chinese restaurant on Canal Street in downtown Manhattan, I saw a rat coming out of the kitchen.) The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are: a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize; b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality); and c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories—when they "Platonify.”

Black Swan
Author:Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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“So when I presented to what was until then the most hostile crowd in the world, members of the American Statistical Association, a map of the four quadrants, and told them: your knowledge works beautifully in these three quadrants, but beware of the fourth one, as this is where the Black Swans breed, I received instant approval, support, offers of permanent friendship, refreshments (Diet Coke), invitations to come present at their sessions, even hugs.”

SupportApprovalHostileCrowdBlack SwanStatistic
Book:The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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“I came to discuss Black Swans, and I intended to tell them that the only thing I know is that we know precious little about them, but that it was their property to sneak up on us, and that attempts at Platonifying them led to additional misunderstandings. Military people can understand such things, and the idea became recently prevalent in military circles with the expression unknown unknown (as opposed to the known unknown).”

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Book:The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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