Lessons from Nassim Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a renowned essayist, statistician, and risk analyst, has profoundly influenced modern thinking on uncertainty, randomness, and resilience. His work, most notably the five-volume "Incerto," challenges conventional wisdom and offers a framework for navigating a world we don't fully understand.

From Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012)

This book introduces the concept of "antifragility," a property of systems that thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, and stressors.

On Antifragility: "Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better." [1][2]
The Nature of Growth: "Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty." [2][3]
A Simple Heuristic: "The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much." [2][4]
Embracing the Unknown: "I want to live happily in a world I don't understand." [2]
On Procrastination: "Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility." [1][3]
The Wisdom of Nature: "What Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise." [1][5]
On Decision Making: "If you have more than one reason to do something... just don't do it. Obvious decisions require no more than a single reason." [1][6]
Learning from Mistakes: "A loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn't introspect, doesn't exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information." [1]
The Value of Errors: "For the robust, an error is information." [7]
On Success and Fragility: "Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile." [4][8]
On Modernity: "Modernity corresponds to the systematic extraction of humans from their randomness-laden ecology – physical and social, even epistemological." [4]
The Agency Problem: "Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference." [3][9]

From The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)

This volume explores "Black Swan events," which are rare, have an extreme impact, and are retrospectively, but not prospectively, predictable.

Defining a Black Swan: A Black Swan event is an outlier, has an extreme impact, and human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable. [10][11]
The Illusion of Understanding: "The human mind suffers from three ailments: The illusion of understanding (nobody knows what's going on), the retrospective distortion (hindsight bias, rearview mirror logic) and the overvaluation of factual information." [3]
The Nature of History: "History does not crawl, it jumps." [3][7]
The Value of Unread Books: "Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don't know as your financial means... allow you to put there." [11][12]
On Prediction: "The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history." [11]
On Experts: "The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know." [11]
The Narrative Fallacy: "We tend to use knowledge as therapy." [12] This refers to our tendency to create stories to make sense of random events.
Globalization's Fragility: "Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability." [13]
On Success and Regret: "Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking." [6][9]
On Skepticism: "I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst." [12]

From Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (2001)

Taleb's first book in the Incerto series, it examines the role of luck and randomness in success and failure.

The Last Word: "No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word." [14][15]
The Nature of Success: "Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance." [8][14]
The Survivorship Bias: "The survivorship bias implies that the highest performing realization will be the most visible. Why? Because the losers do not show up." [3]
On Recognizing Luck: "Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only in his failure." [3]
The Danger of Miscalculation: "Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently... After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security." [14][15]
The Role of Probability: "Probability is not a mere computation of odds... it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance." [14][15]
On Emotional Intelligence: "The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions." [15]
The Toxicity of Information: "The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic." [15]
On Humility: "My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it." [15]

From Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (2018)

This book argues that having "skin in the game", incurring risk for one's decisions, is a necessary condition for fairness, commercial efficiency, and risk management.

The Core Principle: "If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing." [16][17]
On Advice: "Don't tell me what you 'think,' just tell me what's in your portfolio." [18][19]
The Curse of Modernity: "The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing." [18][19]
The Definition of a Free Person: "You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment." [19]
Bureaucracy and Risk: "Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions." [18][19]
The Only Real Virtue: "Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake." [19][20]
On Argument vs. Winning: "Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win." [1]
How Society Evolves: "Society doesn't evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees... only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle." [17]
On True Belief: "How much you truly 'believe' in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it." [19][20]
On Helping Mankind: "Never engage in virtue signaling; Never engage in rent-seeking; You must start a business. Put yourself on the line." [8][19]
The Superiority of Experience: "The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time... is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning." [17][18]

Other Notable Quotes and Concepts

On Wealth: "You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept." [21]
On Addiction: "The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary." [9][21]
On Love: "Love without sacrifice is like theft." [21]
On Difficulty: "Difficulty is what wakes up the genius." [21]
On Employment: "Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed." [9]
On Fraud: "If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud." [7]
On Stoicism: "A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking." [6]
On Success and Self-Respect: "You look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18... If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful." [8]

Learn more:

Lessons from Nassim Taleb

From Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012)

From The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)

From Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (2001)

From Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (2018)

Other Notable Quotes and Concepts

Written by Antoine Buteau

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