Fooled by Randomness Quotes

“Even popular opinion warns that bad information is worse than no information at all.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“Aside from the misperception of one’s performance, there is a social treadmill effect: You get rich, move to rich neighborhoods, then become poor again. To that add the psychological treadmill effect; you get used to wealth and revert to a set point of satisfaction. This problem of some people never really getting to feel satisfied by wealth (beyond a given point) has been the subject of technical discussions on happiness.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“My motto is “my principal activity is to tease those who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“I found luck in the most unexpected of places. It is as if there were two planets: the one in which we actually live and the one, considerably more deterministic, on which people are convinced we live.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“Croesus, King of Lydia, was considered the richest man of his time. To this day Romance languages use the expression “rich as Croesus” to describe a person of excessive wealth.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“While Nero had become inured to the sight of traders getting rich (and trying too hard to become sophisticated by turning into wine collectors and opera lovers), his wife had rarely encountered repressed new wealth—the type of people who have felt the sting of indigence at some point in their lives and want to get even by exhibiting their wares. The only dark side of being a trader, Nero often says, is the sight of money being showered on unprepared people who are suddenly taught that Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is “refined” music.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those that are best fit to the latest cycle.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“Economics Schmeconomics. It is all market dynamics”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“research on happiness shows that those who live under a self-imposed pressure to be optimal in their enjoyment of things suffer a measure of distress.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“Our operation has a mortality rate of 1%. So far we have operated on ninety-nine patients with great success; you are our one hundreth, hence you have a 100% probability of dying on the table.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“Likewise, an increase in personal performance (regardless of whether it is caused deterministically or by the agency of Lady Fortuna) induces a rise of serotonin in the subject, itself causing an increase of what is commonly called “leadership” ability. One is “on a roll.” Some imperceptible changes in deportment, like an ability to express oneself with serenity and confidence, make the subject look credible—as if he truly deserved the shekels. Randomness will be ruled out as a possible factor in the performance, until it rears its head once again and delivers the kick that will induce the downward spiral.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“Croesus, King of Lydia, was considered the richest man of his time. To this day Romance languages use the expression “rich as Croesus” to describe a person of excessive wealth. He was said to be visited by Solon, the Greek legislator known for his dignity, reserve, upright morals, humility, frugality, wisdom, intelligence, and courage. Solon did not display the smallest surprise at the wealth and splendor surrounding his host, nor the tiniest admiration for their owner. Croesus was so irked by the manifest lack of impression on the part of this illustrious visitor that he attempted to extract from him some acknowledgment. He asked him if he had known a happier man than him. Solon cited the life of a man who led a noble existence and died while in battle. Prodded for more, he gave similar examples of heroic but terminated lives, until Croesus, irate, asked him point-blank if he was not to be considered the happiest man of all. Solon answered: “The observation of the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyments, or to admire a man’s happiness that may yet, in course of time, suffer change. For the uncertain future has yet to come, with all variety of future; and him only to whom the divinity has [guaranteed] continued happiness until the end we may call happy.” The modern equivalent has been no less eloquently voiced by the baseball coach Yogi Berra, who seems to have translated Solon’s outburst from the pure Attic Greek into no less pure Brooklyn English with “it ain’t over until it’s over,” or, in a less dignified manner, with “it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“Hume came to warn us against such knowledge, and to stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“Cygnus Atratus In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“On alternative histories, a probabilistic view of the world, intellectual fraud, and the randomness wisdom of a Frenchman with steady bathing habits. How journalists are bred to not understand random series of events.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“Such trait of absence of marriage to ideas is indeed rare among humans. Just as we do with children, we support those in whom we have a heavy investment of food and time until they are able to propagate our genes, so we do with ideas. An academic who became famous for espousing an opinion is not going to voice anything that can possibly devalue his own past work and kill years of investment. People who switch parties become traitors, renegades, or, worst of all, apostates (those who abandoned their religion were punishable by death).”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“As the skeptics’ main teaching was that nothing could be accepted with certainty, conclusions of various degrees of probability could be formed, and these supplied a guide to conduct.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“You may prefer apples to oranges, oranges to pears, but pears to apples—it depends on how the choices are presented to you.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“examined the cures from cancer that resulted from a visit to Lourdes in France, where people were healed by simple contact with the holy waters, and found out the interesting fact that, of the total cancer patients who visited the place, the cure rate was, if anything, lower than the statistical one for spontaneous remissions. It was lower than the average for those who did not go to Lourdes! Should a statistician infer here that cancer patients’ odds of surviving deteriorates after a visit to Lourdes?”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“I am convinced that there exists a tradable security in the Western world that would be 100% correlated with the changes in temperature in Ulan Bator,”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“I engage in a gambling strategy that has 999 chances in 1,000 of making $ 1 (event A) and 1 chance in 1,000 of losing $ 10,000 (event B), as in Table 6.1. My expectation is a loss of close to $ 9 (obtained by multiplying the probabilities by the corresponding outcomes).”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“On a folded piece of paper, in turn, each one of them would write a predetermined part of a sentence, not knowing the others’ choice. The first would pick an adjective, the second a noun, the third a verb, the fourth an adjective, and the fifth a noun. The first publicized exercise of such random (and collective) arrangement produced the following poetic sentence: The exquisite cadavers shall drink the new wine. (Les cadavres exquis boiront le vin nouveau.) Impressive? It sounds even more poetic in the native French. Quite impressive poetry has been produced in such a manner, sometimes with the aid of a computer.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“Finally, this explains why people who look too closely at randomness burn out, their emotions drained by the series of pangs they experience. Regardless of what people claim, a negative pang is not offset by a positive one (some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“my wish is for people in general to remain fools of randomness (so I can trade against them), yet for there to remain a minority intelligent enough to value my methods and hire my services.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“While a ten-year survival rate for a trader is in the single digits, that of a risk manager is close to 100%).”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“notion of alternative accounting: $ 10 million earned through Russian roulette does not have the same value as $ 10 million earned through the diligent and artful practice of dentistry.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“He is susceptible to conference room boredom and is incapable of talking to businessmen, particularly the run-of-the-mill variety. Nero is allergic to the vocabulary of business talk, not just on plain aesthetic grounds. Phrases like “game plan,” “bottom line,” “how to get there from here,” “we provide our clients with solutions,” “our mission,” and other hackneyed expressions that dominate meetings lack both the precision and the coloration that he prefers to hear. Whether people populate silence with hollow sentences, or if such meetings present any true merit, he does not know; at any rate he did not want to be part of it.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“Nero believes that risk-conscious hard work and discipline can lead someone to achieve a comfortable life with a very high probability. Beyond that, it is all randomness: either by taking enormous (and unconscious) risks, or by being extraordinarily lucky. Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“those who are very good at predicting the past will think of themselves as good at predicting the future,”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets