Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

Those who made the decisions with imperfect knowledge will be judged in hindsight by those with considerably more information at their disposal and time for reflection.

With any possibly erroneous decision, you can always look back and think you could've done something differently - but always with the benefit of hindsight.

Chris Davis [of the Davisfunds] has a temple of shame. He celebrates the things they did that lost them a lot of money. What is also needed is a temple of shame squared for things you didn't do that would have made you rich. Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition. Reality doesn't remind you. Why not celebrate stupidities in both categories?

We will never have 100 percent certainty except in hindsight.

We need to be able to make decisions even though part of the information that we have is incorrect and wrong.

As not infrequently happens in the affairs of war, it is easier to point out mistakes after they are committed, than to see and avoid them amid the difficulties and dangers by which the military commander is at the moment surrounded.

Fully consider the future and the immediate results of all undertakings, and the good and bad sides of all past actions.

Time and again ... governments have rejected proposals today—and longed for them tomorrow.

One cannot always be right in our complex world; no dishonor attends an incorrect choice among plausible outcomes drawn from a properly constructed argument.

One must be careful not to prejudge the past.

We’re pretty good in Washington at Monday morning quarterbacking.

The pressure of time, is the overwhelming challenge for policymakers who must act on assessments that cannot be proved at the time and whose mistakes are irretrievable.

One cannot guarantee that if we have good intelligence, good policy will necessarily follow. But we can guarantee that if we have poor intelligence, poor policy will necessarily follow.

We should never look down on those of the past and say they should have known better. What do you think they will be saving about us in the future? They’re going to be saying we should have known better.

Historians often find important decisions few knew were important at the time.

The way we work in public health is, we make the best recommendations and decisions based on the best available data.

You need a different checklist and different mental models for different companies.

There's always a knee-jerk reaction in our business to analyze and determine why something didn't work.

I saw Spurs as being a very good fit for me - but we were unable to agree financial terms with them... With hindsight, though, that was not a disaster.

Hindsight is, of course, 20/20. Any time you go back, and you look at something, and now you've got the result of something, you say, 'Yeah, maybe it wasn't the right idea.'

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I was maybe too quick to leave Fulham.

The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.

It's all well and good to look back after the fact and see what we should have done, but we rarely know what path is best when we take that first step.

At gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck.

There are no bad people, there are people with insufficient information to make appropriate decisions.