Nassim Taleb Quotes

A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence. The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent. If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more. What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get. The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much. It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously. We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order...we take what we know a little too seriously. A good rule of thumb is as follows: If the numbers come from somebody wearing a tie (Wall Street economist or analyst, industry public relations department, captive think tank academic and so on), you ought to be very skeptical. By design messages from these people are intended to move markets, move merchandise and/or move public policy and are not a comment on the state of the physical universe. You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness. Luck is the grand equalizer. By all means, avoid words�'threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words! Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties. The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology. Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness. If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry. I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse. The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this 'nerdification,' to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally. My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary. The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist Love without sacrifice is like theft Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves. The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination 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) The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing