If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Prologue (2012)
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Quotations by:
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas
Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
Fooled by Randomness, Part 1, ch. 2 (2001)
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Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
Fooled by Randomness, Part 1, ch. 1 (2001)
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The epic poet did not judge his heroes by the result: Heroes won and lost battles in a manner that was totally independent of their own valor; their fate depended upon totally external forces, generally the explicit agency of the scheming gods (not devoid of nepotism(. Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or loss.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
Fooled by Randomness, Part 1, ch. 2 (2001)
It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
Fooled by Randomness, Prologue (2001)
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Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
Fooled by Randomness, Prologue (2001)
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They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Epistomology and Subtractive Knowledge” (2010)
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Knowledge is subtractive, not additive — what we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Epistomology and Subtractive Knowledge” (2010)
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There are those who will thank you for what you gave them and others who will blame you for what you did not give them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Ethics” (2010)
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Just as dyed hair makes older men less attractive, it is what you do to hide your weaknesses that makes them repugnant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Ethics” (2010)
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For soldiers, we use the term “mercenary,” but we absolve employees of responsibility with “everybody needs to make a living.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Ethics” (2010)
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Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain — our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Postface” (2010)
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When the map does not correspond to the territory, 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 — who enter a state of denial, imagining the territory as fitting the map.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Postface” (2010)
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Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Preludes” (2010)
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Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do — something people who take showers discover on occasion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Preludes” (2010)
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If your anger decreases with time, you did injustice; if it increases, you suffered injustice.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Preludes” (2010)
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The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Preludes” (2010)
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An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Preludes” (2010)
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People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than in what you are trying to hide.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Preludes” (2010)
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For the robust, an error is information; for the fragile, an error is an error.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Robustness and Antifragility” (2010)
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Failure-resistant is achievable; failure-free is not.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Robustness and Antifragility” (2010)
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We humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, Introduction (2010)
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I don’t particularly care about the usual. If you want to get an idea of a friend’s temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Black Swan, Introduction (2007)
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History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what’s inside the box, how the mechanisms work. What I call the generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds. You are very likely to be fooled about their intentions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Black Swan, Part 1, ch. 1 “The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic” (2007)
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But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Black Swan, Part 1, ch. 5 “Confirmation Shmonfirmation!” (2007)
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Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Black Swan, Part 1, ch. 1 “The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic” (2007)
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Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients — and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Black Swan, Part 2, ch. 10 “The Scandal of Prediction” (2007)
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Don’t cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Black Swan, Part 2, ch. 10 “The Scandal of Prediction” (2007)
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Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Black Swan, Part 2, ch. 10 “The Scandal of Prediction” (2007)
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The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death. Both conclusions rely on the exact same data.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Black Swan, Part 2, ch. 11 “How to Look for Bird Poop” (2007)
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Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules. Add to these tasks the “duty” of attending opera performances.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Black Swan, Part 2, ch. 11 “How to Look for Bird Poop” (2007)
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Alas, one cannot assert authority by accepting one’s own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge — we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Black Swan, Part 2, ch. 12 “Epistemocracy, a Dream” (2007)
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Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Black Swan, Part 2, ch. 13 “Appelles the Painter, or What Do You Do If You Cannot Predict” (2007)
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