“As a general rule, most “regrets” after one is caught’s aren’t regrets about having committed the action, but regrets about having been caught. Apologies count only when they are spontaneous, coming out of deep principles. Otherwise they are just an expression of submission.”
Nassim Taleb
Continue reading “QUOTES OF THE DAY”
If ever an intellectual has achieved “street cred” and the “cool factor,” it is Nassim Taleb, author of the best-sellers The Black Swan and Antifragile. Taleb’s reputation as a scholar, for his contributions to the subject of risk management, is well deserved, and his extraordinary popularity no less so. With over 264,000 Twitter followers and absolutely packed halls wherever he speaks, Taleb is known for provocation, iconoclasm, and confident repudiation of conventional thinking.
The collective useable expertise of all the people at the WH correspondent's dinner is lower than what you find in a single plumber, pastry chef, railroad engineer, or car mechanic with mufflers & exhaust systems subspecialty.#skininthegame pic.twitter.com/s86LasFoGc
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) May 1, 2018
People ask me my forecast for the economy when they should be asking me what I have in my portfolio. Don’t make pronouncements on what could happen in the future if you’re immune from the consequences. In French, they use the same word for wallet and portfolio.
I have never, ever borrowed a penny. So I have zero credit record. No loans, no mortgage, nothing. Ever. When I had no money, I rented. I have an allergy to borrowing and a scorn for people who are in debt, and I don’t hide it. I follow the Romans’ attitude that debtors are not free people.
“Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.”
Nassim Taleb
“Life is a school of probabilities.”
Walter Bagehot
“We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake. Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it.”
Sir Eddie George, Bank of England, September 1999
Authored by George Eaton via NewStatesman.com,
In Taleb’s universe, the fieriest circle of hell is reserved for bankers and neoconservatives.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an intellectual brawler, a philosophical pugilist. His new book, Skin in the Game, put me in mind of the final scene of The Godfather or Reservoir Dogs: everybody gets whacked. Bankers and bureaucrats, warmongers and wonks – all are targeted by Taleb.
Continue reading “Taleb: “Best Thing For Society Is Bankruptcy Of Goldman Sachs””
Guest Post by Nassim Taleb
When selecting a surgeon for your next brain procedure, should you pick a surgeon who looks like a butcher or one who looks like a surgeon? The logic of skin in the game implies you need to select the one who (while credentialed) looks the least like what you would expect from a surgeon, or, rather, the Hollywood version of a surgeon.
The same logic mysteriously answers many vital questions, such as 1) the difference between rationality and rationalization, 2) that between virtue and virtue signaling, 3) the nature of honor and sacrifice, 4) Religion and signaling (why the pope is functionally atheist) 5) the justification for economic inequality that doesn’t arise from rent seeking, 6) why to never tell people your forecasts (only discuss publicly what you own in your portfolio) and, 7) even, how and from whom to buy your next car.
Continue reading “What do I mean by Skin in the Game? My Own Version”
Guest Post by Nassim Taleb
Skin in the Game is another addition to the Incerto, now volume 5; I avoided duplication by referring to where in the Incerto some points were developed such as via negativa or monoculture of forecasters or expert problems. You simply don’t repeat in chapter 23 what was said in chapter 5, but can make reference to it.
Now it so happens that I am in the BS busting category, which includes journalists (especially journalists). And the book is designed to be hated by BS operators who can be book reviewers. I instructed publishers to send the book to only doers, not people who make a verbagiastic living.
Let me say it again. I am intolerant of BS; I suffers no fools except when the BS is harmless.
Guest Post by Nassim Taleb
What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.
But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
“When immigration is done by single individuals, it is immigration. When done by groups, it is invasion.”
Nassim Taleb
“So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
“Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
I had read Nassim Taleb’s other best-selling tomes about risk, randomness and black swans – Fooled by Randomness & The Black Swan. They were not easy reads, but they were must reads. He is clearly a brilliant thinker, but I like him more because he is a prickly skeptic who scorns and ridicules academics, politicians, and Wall Street scumbags with gusto. There were many passages which baffled me, but so many nuggets of wisdom throughout each book, you couldn’t put them down.
When his Antifragile book was published in 2012, the name intimidated me. I figured it was too intellectual for my tastes. When I saw it on the shelf in my favorite used book store at the beach, I figured it was worth a read for $9. I’m plowing through it and I haven’t been disappointed.
His main themes are more pertinent today than they were in 2012. He published The Black Swan in 2007, just prior to one of the biggest black swans in world history – the 2008 Federal Reserve/Wall Street created financial collapse. His disdain for “experts” like Bernanke, Paulson, and Wall Street CEOs, and their inability to comprehend the consequences of their actions and in-actions as the financial system was blown sky high, was a bulls-eye.
“In the old days, privilege came with obligations—except for the small class of intellectuals who served a patron or, in some cases, the state. You want to be a feudal lord—you will be first to die. You want war? First in battle. Let us not forget something embedded in the U.S. Constitution: the president is commander in chief. Caesar, Alexander, and Hannibal were on the battlefield—the last, according to Livy, was first-in, last-out of combat zones. George Washington, too, went to battle, unlike Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who played video games while threatening the lives of others.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
“I feel anger and frustration when I think that one in ten Americans beyond the age of high school is on some kind of antidepressant, such as Prozac. Indeed, when you go through mood swings, you now have to justify why you are not on some medication. There may be a few good reasons to be on medication, in severely pathological cases, but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence–perhaps even the first source. I get mellow and lose physical energy when it rains, become more meditative, and tend to write more and more slowly then, with the raindrops hitting the window, what Verlaine called autumnal “sobs” (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks huzun (from the Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy–and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile?”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it get to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it—books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
“much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“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.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“Never listen to a leftist who does not give away his fortune or does not live the exact lifestyle he wants others to follow. What the French call “the caviar left,” la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists, are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political system with sumptuary limitations, while overtly leading a lavish lifestyle, often financed by inheritance—not realizing the contradiction that they want others to avoid just such a lifestyle. It is not too different from the womanizing popes, such as John XII, or the Borgias. The contradiction can exceed the ludicrous as with French president François Mitterrand of France who, coming in on a socialist platform, emulated the pomp of French monarchs. Even more ironic, his traditional archenemy, the conservative General de Gaulle, led a life of old-style austerity and had his wife sew his socks.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
“More data—such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street—can make you miss the big truck.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
“The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it get to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
“Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
“Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
“It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life— with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder