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
thinking addiction greed
Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending
jobs lying knowing
People who forecast simply because "that's my job," knowing pretty well that their forecast is ineffectual, are not what I would call ethical. What they do is no different from repeating lies simply because "it's my job."
winning argument persons
You never win an argument until they attack your person.
war might able
It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
intelligent ideas messages
An ad hominem attack against an individual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.
reputation
Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.
real understanding world
Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
entrepreneur financial existential
Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing.
book library owners
Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
party serendipity suffering
Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
trying rats normal
If you hear a "prominent" economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.
running ideas missing
Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.
mother odds law
If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.
taken differences variables
There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.