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
needs world
In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
world want
I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.
practice our-world secret
There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.
thinking different world
The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
thinking world patterns
They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)
order perfect world
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
real understanding world
Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
serendipity luck
...maximize the serendipity around you.
weakness
It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.
callous designed people provide social turn
In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.
functions home human run textbook understood victims view
We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.
noticed
Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.
drop except local
I don't go to the doctor except when I'm very ill, and when I go to India, I drink a drop of local water.
accept false knowledge limits people
The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.