Money and Finance
- Nassim Taleb Quote
"Subtractive knowledge is a form of barbell. Critically, it is convex. What is wrong is quite robust, what you don’t know is fragile and speculative, but you do not take it seriously so you make sure it does not harm you in case it turns out to be false."...
- Nassim Taleb Quote
“Clearly, it is unrigorous to equate skills at doing with skills at talking. My experience of good practitioners is that they can be totally incomprehensible—they do not have to put much energy into turning their insights and internal coherence into...
- Nassim Taleb And Barbells
The quotes below are from Antifragile(though they may not be exact, as Kindle Highlights don’t pick up on things like italics).What do we mean by barbell? The barbell (a bar with weights on both ends that weight lifters use) is meant to illustrate the...
- Nassim Taleb On Stoics And Stoicism
From Fooled by Randomness:"Having control over randomness can be expressed in the manner in which one acts in the small and the large. Recall that epic heroes were judged by their actions, not by the results. No matter how sophisticated our choices, how...
- Nassim Taleb Talk At Wharton
People kept telling me I was an idiot for years [because] I didn’t invest in markets. I don’t invest in the stock market because I think it’s a sucker’s game. I make my money and I put it in a repository [of value]. Or sometimes I just do these...
Money and Finance
Nassim Taleb quotes
From Antifragile:
Remember from the logic of the barbell that it is necessary to first remove fragilities.
I have used all my life a wonderfully simple heuristic: charlatans are recognizable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness for recipes that hit you in a flash as just obvious, then evaporate later as you forget them. Just look at the “how to” books with, in their title, “Ten Steps for—” (fill in: enrichment, weight loss, making friends, innovation, getting elected, building muscles, finding a husband, running an orphanage, etc.). Yet in practice it is the negative that’s used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid. You reduce most of your personal risks of accident thanks to a small number of measures.
Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed—but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.
Now when it comes to knowledge, the same applies. The greatest—and most robust—contribution to knowledge consists in removing what we think is wrong—subtractive epistemology.
In life, antifragility is reached by not being a sucker.
- Nassim Taleb Quote
"Subtractive knowledge is a form of barbell. Critically, it is convex. What is wrong is quite robust, what you don’t know is fragile and speculative, but you do not take it seriously so you make sure it does not harm you in case it turns out to be false."...
- Nassim Taleb Quote
“Clearly, it is unrigorous to equate skills at doing with skills at talking. My experience of good practitioners is that they can be totally incomprehensible—they do not have to put much energy into turning their insights and internal coherence into...
- Nassim Taleb And Barbells
The quotes below are from Antifragile(though they may not be exact, as Kindle Highlights don’t pick up on things like italics).What do we mean by barbell? The barbell (a bar with weights on both ends that weight lifters use) is meant to illustrate the...
- Nassim Taleb On Stoics And Stoicism
From Fooled by Randomness:"Having control over randomness can be expressed in the manner in which one acts in the small and the large. Recall that epic heroes were judged by their actions, not by the results. No matter how sophisticated our choices, how...
- Nassim Taleb Talk At Wharton
People kept telling me I was an idiot for years [because] I didn’t invest in markets. I don’t invest in the stock market because I think it’s a sucker’s game. I make my money and I put it in a repository [of value]. Or sometimes I just do these...