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Quotes from Fooled by Randomness — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

born 1960 Lebanon

← All quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

32 quotes

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

A trader's mental construction should direct him to do precisely what other people do not do.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

I reject a sole time series of the past as an indication of future performance; I need a lot more than data.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

I have two ways of learning from history: from the past, by reading the elders; and from the future, thanks to my Monte Carlo toy.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Mixing forecast and prophecy is symptomatic of randomness-foolishness...

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

From the standpoint of an institution, the existence of a risk manager has less to do with actual risk reduction than it has to do with the impression of risk reduction.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Sometimes market data becomes a simple trap; it shows you the opposite of its nature... [e.g.,] Currencies that exhibit the largest historical stability... are the most prone to crashes.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

[T]he mental probabilistic map in one's mind is so geared toward the sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Unlike a well-defined, precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

[W]e like to emit logical and rational ideas but we do not enjoy this execution.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Nassim Nicholas Taleb (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.