Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Talebis a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by the Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II...
NationalityLebanese
ProfessionScientist
CountryLebanon
hero heroic behavior
Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.
ignorance acceptance odds
Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.
respect decision someday
It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.
envy looks wealth
They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.
luck equalizer
Luck is the grand equalizer.
business punishment want
I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.
being-yourself jobs school
You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
children way clarity
Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
fool pay worst
We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.
country jail may
The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.
distance relevant sensational
Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
common-sense common excuse
Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
errors information robust
For the robust, an error is information.
mother humility years
I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism