Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Knowledge

"conomists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality."

"My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know...."

"We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude."

"A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point."

"The casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known, Gaussian , and almost computable."

"Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility."

"But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right."

"The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse."

"Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category."

"The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country."

"Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love."

"I want to live happily in a world I don't understand."

"For the robust, an error is information."

"We tend to use knowledge as therapy."

"The information that a person derived some profit in the past... by itself, is neither meaningful nor relevant. We need to know the size of the population from which he came. If the initial population is 10,000 managers, I would ignore the results."

"Over a short time increment, one observes the variability of the portfolio, not the returns. ...ne sees the variance, little else. ...Our emotions are not designed to understand the point. ...I deal with it by having no access to information. ...I prefer to read poetry."

"Consider that the turkey's experience may have, rather than no value, a negative value. It learned from observation, as we are all advised to do . Its confidence increased as the number of friendly feedings grew, and it felt increasingly safe even though the slaughter was more and more imminent. Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest!"

"economics... you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. Now the spirit of such methods, called scientism by its detractors, continued into the discipline of finance as a few technicians thought their mathematical knowledge could lead them to understand markets. The practice of financial engineering came along with massive doses of pseudoscience."

"Science had shifted, thanks to Bacon, into an emphasis on empirical observation. The problem is that, without a proper method, empirical observations can lead you astray. Hume came to... stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge... epistemology... Hume is the first modern epistemologist... he was an obsessive skeptic and never believed... that a link between two items could be established as being causal."

"Statistics... is all based on... the steady augmentation of the confidence level... or an n times increase in sample size, we increase our knowledge by the square root on n. ...Where statistics ...fails us, is when we have distributions that are not symmetric... If there is a very small probability of finding a red ball in an urn dominated by black ones, then our knowledge about the absence of red balls will increase slowly. ...On the other hand, our knowledge of the presence of red balls will dramatically improve once one of them is found. This asymmetry in knowledge... is the central philosophical problem for... David Hume and Karl Popper."

"The major problem with inference... is that those whose profession it is to derive conclusions from data often fall into the trap faster and more confidently... The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it. For common wisdom... is to base... decision making on the following principle: It is very unlikely for someone to perform... well in a consistent fashion without doing something right. ...f someone performed better... in the past then there is a great chance of performing better than the crowd in the future... But... small knowledge of probability can lead to worse results than no knowledge at all."