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
risk caves research
Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.
risk exposure no-point
At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.
funeral delay corporations
In the United States large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation’s funeral at our expense.
ideas interesting scared
An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
reading years week
To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.
thinking people rewards
We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
hard-work bmw luck
Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
hard-work opportunity odds
Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters-you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
math america errors
Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure.
events cases worst
But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.
fall men gym-rats
I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.
world want
I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.
mean writing ideas
Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea.