Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

We try to organize the world, which isn't organized the way our brains want to organize it. We tell stories about the people in our lives, we project ideas onto them. We project relationships with people, we make our lives into stories. I don't think we can avoid doing that.

The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.

man has an irrepressible tendency to read meaning into the buzzing confusion of sights and sounds impinging on his senses; and where no agreed meaning can be found, he will provide it out of his own imagination.

To know truly is to know by causes.

If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word “coincidence” exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.

Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.

Moreover, joint occurrences tend to be better recalled than instances when the effect does not occur. The proneness to remember confirming instances, but to overlook disconfirming ones, further serves to convert, in thought, coincidences into causalities.

It's human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation (particularly if you're the lucky manager).

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.

Our brains are wired to interpret shapes as faces and bodies. That's why people see the Virgin Mary in the clouds or even in cheese sandwiches. It's your cytoplasm, not some strange ectoplasm.

The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.

The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.

Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity).

...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.

We know the effects of many things, but the cause of few; experience, therefore, is a surer guide than imagination, and inquiry than conjecture.

Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.

Reason deceives us more often than does nature.

To recognize causes is to think, and through thought alone feelings become knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to mature.

People are storytelling creatures. We like stories that go somewhere, and therefore we like trends - because trends are things that either get better or get worse, so we can either rejoice or lament. But we mistakenly depict many things as trends moving in some direction. We take the "full house" of variation in a system and try to represent it as a single number, when in fact what we should be doing is studying the variation as it expands and contracts. If you look at the history of the variation in all its complexity, then you see there's no trend.

I love humans; always seeing patterns in things that aren’t there.

You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.

so mortals tend to see only what they can understand.

Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.

We aren't natural statisticians. What we are is natural storytelling machines. And so what we do after we have the facts in hand is build a story to explain the facts.