Nassim Nicholas Taleb

born in 1960 AD; still alive (age ~64)

writer on probability & risk


Quotes (Authored)

The wealth process is dominated by winner-take-all effects. Any form of control of the wealth process—typically instigated by bureaucrats—tends to lock people with privileges in their state of entitlement. So the solution is to allow the system to destroy the strong, something that works best in the United States.

Regulators have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible so their expertise can later be hired at a higher price.

So there is an implicit bribe in civil service: you act as a servant to an industry, say, Monsanto, and they take care of you later on.

One (now "resigned") department head one day came to me and emitted the warning: "Just as, when a businessman and author you are judged by other businessmen and authors, here as an academic you are judged by other academics. Life is about peer assessment."

It took me a while to overcome my disgust—I am still not familiar with the way non-risk-takers work; they actually don't realize that others are not like them, and can't get what makes real people tick.

You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.

People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.

The minute one is judged by others rather than by reality, things become warped.

I accidentally discovered a way to change the behavior of unethical and abusive persons without verbal threat. Take their pictures.

Journalism isn't Lindy compatible. Information transmits organically by word of mouth, which circulates in a two-way manner.

You can't fool people more than twice.

You never cure structural defects; the system corrects itself by collapsing.

If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.

Courage (risk taking) is the highest virtue.

No peace proceeds from bureaucratic ink. If you want peace, make people trade, as they have done for millennia. They will be eventually forced to work something out.

Religion exists to enforce tail risk management across generations, as its binary and unconditional rules are easy to teach and enforce. We have survived in spite of tail risks; our survival cannot be that random.

How much you truly "believe" in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.

If you give an opinion, and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences.

Never engage in detailed over explanations of why something important is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.

We are vastly better off complaining about lawyers than complaining about not having them.

By definition, what works cannot be irrational... if something stupid works, it cannot be stupid.

People who sell complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones... when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication.

Freedom is one's first most essential good. This includes the freedom to make mistakes (those that harm only you); it is sacred to the point that it must never be traded against economic or other benefits.

People who are not morally independent tend to fit ethics to their profession, rather than find a profession that fits their ethics.

Products or companies that bear the owner's name convey very valuable messages. They are shouting that they have something to lose.

Learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once.

The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse.

No compensation is worth the feeling of shame.

The best slave is someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status.

What matters isn't what a person has or doesn't have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.

Far-fetched comparisons are more likely to discredit the commentator than the commentated.

Action without talk always supersedes talk without action.

Where the state is large, people at the top tend to have little downward mobility... and no downside for some means no upside for the rest.

If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure.

Hire, conditional on an equal set of skills, the person with the least label-oriented education. It means that the person had to succeed in spite of the credentialization of his competitors and overcome more serious hurdles.

It takes a lot of energy to fake that you're not bored.