Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.

The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other.

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.

You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient.

For the robust, an error is information.

Complex systems work until the day that they don’t work.

Any system that is deprived of its natural volatility, with government up (unintelligible) volatile, any system becomes very fragile.

Information is shock resistance. Arm yourself.

When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.

Every day when I get on the floor I give it my all and play because you never know what tomorrow holds.

Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence.” Cascading rumors are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumors. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumors, be robust in the face of them.

People, they don't know how to bend; they just break.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

You can never expect things to happen like they did the last time. You still have to put in the work.

Bubbles are weird things. They're not fragile. They're infinitely flexible. They're not what we think they are.

I am not fragile.

Sometimes you get hit on the nose and nothing happens, then you get hit and something breaks.

I've taken great pride in not being fragile.

It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena.

The great unexplored frontier is complexity ... I am convinced that the nations and people that master the new science of Complexity will become the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century.

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.

Nothing is written stone, child. Even if it were, the stones can be shattered

When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.