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
investing leap
History doesn't crawl; it leaps.
odds risk investing
If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull - you don't even know how many sides the dice have!
two errors investing
Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.
errors made plenty
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any.
arrogance fool pseudo
There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.
ignorance knowledge information
Information is bad for knowledge.
way rich poor
The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.
perfect aim
Don't aim to be perfect! Aim to be antifragile
taken play decision
My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates-and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain.
may causes belief
Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.
mean social certain
Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.
stress modern-life life-is
Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.
practice information theory
While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
fool wasting-time investment
What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment.