WIST Quotations

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Prologue (2012)

Dave — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 17:40:46 +0000

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)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- Fooled by Randomness, Part 1, ch. 2 (2001)

Dave — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 18:01:27 +0000

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)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- Fooled by Randomness, Part 1, ch. 1 (2001)

Dave — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 17:55:12 +0000

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)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- Fooled by Randomness, Part 1, ch. 2 (2001)

Dave — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 17:11:34 +0000

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)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- Fooled by Randomness, Prologue (2001)

Dave — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 21:59:46 +0000

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)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- Fooled by Randomness, Prologue (2001)

Dave — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 18:10:26 +0000

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)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Epistomology and Subtractive Knowledge” (2010)

Dave — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 18:18:50 +0000

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)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Epistomology and Subtractive Knowledge” (2010)

Dave — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 19:59:56 +0000

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).

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Ethics” (2010)

Dave — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 22:41:24 +0000

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)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Ethics” (2010)

Dave — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 18:59:56 +0000

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)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Ethics” (2010)

Dave — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 22:03:04 +0000

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)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Postface” (2010)

Dave — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 17:48:20 +0000

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)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Postface” (2010)

Dave — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 20:47:06 +0000

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)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, “Preludes” (2010)

Dave — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 15:30:49 +0000

Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.