Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science,… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“I believe that forcing researchers to eat their own cooking whenever possible solves a serious problem in science.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
Scientists don't know what they are talking about when they talk about religion. Religion has nothing to do with belief, and I… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“One conceivable way to discriminate between a scientific intellectual and a literary intellectual is by considering that a scientific intellectual can usually… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“People confuse science and scientists. Science is great, but individual scientists are dangerous. They are human; they are marred by the biases… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
“Economics is not a science and should not be there to advise policy.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share Image
Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
“Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
“One needs to go out and buy a lottery ticket in order to win. Does it mean that the work involved in the trip… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
“If you are looking for your misplaced wallet in your living room, in a trial and error mode, you exercise rationality by not looking… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
“Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
“loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones also causes aging, diabetes, and, for males, loss of fertility and sexual… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
“It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent “studying” the news last month neither had any… — Nassim Nicholas Taleb Copy Share
