We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions."
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb in "The Black Swan" (2007)
We are too brainwashed by notions of causality and we think that it is smarter to say 'because' than to accept randomness."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb in "The Black Swan" (2007)
Anyone who causes harm by forecasting should be treated as either a fool or as a liar. Some forecasters cause more damage to society than criminals. Please, don't drive a school bus blindfolded."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb in "The Black Swan" (2007)
The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb in "The Black Swan" (2007)
My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them from withholding judgment, for uttering 'I don't know'."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb in "The Black Swan" (2007)
We are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent on as THE explanation. Yet there may be not be a visible because; to the contrary; frequently there is nothing, not even a spectrum of possible explanations."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb in "The Black Swan" (2007)
To those who say "We have no proof that we are harming nature" a sound response is "We have no proof that we are not harming nature, either"; the burden of proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb in "The Black Swan" (2007)
What is fragile should break early, while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of risk become the biggest."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb in "The Black Swan" (2007)
Do not give children dynamite sticks, even if they come with a warning label. Complex financial products need to be banned because nobody understands them, and few are rational enough to know it. We need to protect citizens form themselves, from bankers selling them "hedging" products and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb in "The Black Swan" (2007)
Citizens should experience anxiety from their own business (which they control) and not from their investments (which they do not not control.)"
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb in "The Black Swan" (2007)
Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, capacity to sustain boredom and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules. Add to this the "duty" of attending opera performances."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb in "The Black Swan" (2007)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
"Nassim Nicholas Taleb (alternatively Nessim or Nissim, born 1960) is a Lebanese philosophical essayist and practitioner of mathematical finance. He wrote the 2007 book The Black Swan, which a Sunday Times review described as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II.
He is a bestselling author, and has been a professor at several universities, currently at Polytechnic Institute of New York University and Oxford University. He has also been a hedge fund manager and Wall Street trader, and is currently a scientific adviser at Universa Investments.
He criticized the finance industry and warned about financial crises, subsequently making a fortune out of the financial crisis of 2007–2010. He advocates what he calls a "black swan robust" society, meaning a society that can withstand difficult-to-predict events.
He favors "stochastic tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means experimentation and fact-collecting instead of top-down directed research."
(This piece was refurbished on 24th of December, 2012)
