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
confusion
Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
stuck randomness dangerous
When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
sometimes randomness wells
Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans.
independent people benefits
I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.
want
An option hides where we don't want it to hide.
flags speech labels
It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag , a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation.
realism skepticism
Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.
tangible favors embedded
We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
eye reality effort
By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.
persons
The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.
tails crash rationalism
Rationalism crashes in the tails.
ideas rare-events swans
The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.
long feelings guilt
You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.
character numbers rejection
Character is proportionate to N, the number of consecutive failures without being discouraged, or equivalently, the number of successive rejections without being intimidated.