Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom

📊 Top 10 Most Liked Posts from @TalebWisdom – April 2025 A recap of your favorite Taleb quotes last month: 🧵👇 1. "Missing a train is only painful if you run after it".

"Life is much, much easier when you treat all humans as flawed and imperfect, but flawed in quite different ways." - Nassim Taleb

"We ingest probiotics because we don’t eat enough “dirt” anymore." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes amazon.com/gp/product/198…

"Avoid calling heroes those who had no other choice." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

"Complex systems are full of interdependencies—hard to detect—and nonlinear responses." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"People tend to whisper when they say the truth and raise their voice when they lie." - @nntaleb

"Robustness is progress without impatience." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

"But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This "goal-driven" attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self." - Taleb

"A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

"What annoys you more, + mosquitoes, or + IYIs (Intellectual Yet Idiots) who discuss their elimination thinking they understand the consequences?" - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"The only way to prevent institutions from rotting is by automatic dissolution, to have the same life expectancy as free-market companies." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Revenge isn't just revenge. It's a deterrent." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb #revenge

"In your prayers substitute "protect us from evil" with "protect us from those who improve things for a salary"." - @nntaleb

"Truth is in the extremes. There is no noise in the far tails." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"To teach someone a real skill, teach him how to take risk & fail. He will never learn this in school. No nonrisktaker can ever teach it. " - Nassim Taleb #risk

"Intellect without balls is like a racecar without tires." - @nntaleb

"If we are the only animal with a sense of justice, it would clearly be because we also are about the only animal with a sense of cruelty." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"The Nation-state: apartheid without political incorrectness." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

"A Lebanese fellow said, criticizing my hyper localism: "but there is a lot of corruption within municipalities". Answer: "Corruption shows very easily within municipalities"." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb amazon.com/gp/product/198…

"Why statistician are way out of their depth w/BIG DATA: + To a statistician, there are single variables, scalars, vectors, and matrices, separate "tings" in various degrees of complication. + To a probabilist, a scalar is just a low dimensional matrix. All the same "ting"."