Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.”
“Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. Second, unlike a well-defined precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality. One is capable of unwittingly playing Russian roulette - and calling it by some alternative “low risk” game.”
“Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.”
“Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.”
“No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.”
“A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in light of the information available until that point”
“Never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact - and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings.”
“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”
“My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.”
“We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.”
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Book Keywords:
tact, truth, inspirational, reality-check, lesson-for-life
