Nassim Nicholas Taleb: I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.

Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

replacements greatness hatred

You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool for improvement.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

valleys tools doe

What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

wasting-time investment fool

If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

taken decision past

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

save-a-life crash next

To bankrupt a fool, give him information.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

fool information giving

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

annoying poetry want

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

real book knowledge

What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

accepting doe america

Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

errors math america

The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

persons

For the robust, an error is information.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

robust information errors

The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

ornaments weakness shows

Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut, and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

ignorance doe knowledge

Paul Krugman is a danger to society!

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

danger

A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

assets risk country

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

doctors differences simple

The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

academic genius imagination

If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

typewriters education numbers

When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

portfolios investing return