Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom

Sharing Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom from his books, interviews, and tweets.

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📊 Top 10 Most Liked Posts from @TalebWisdom – April 2025

A recap of your favorite Taleb quotes last month:
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1. "Missing a train is only painful if you run after it".

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom @TalebWisdom]

"Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes https://t.co/gfx7MU8aDt

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom @TalebWisdom]

"To illustrate that the "health benefits" of the Mediterranean diet aren’t in the diet: people spend their lives climbing stairs and doing intermittent fasts. " - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom @TalebWisdom]

"Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For instance, you study every day and learn something in proportion to your studies. If you do not feel that you are going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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"One categorical: it is easier to fast than diet. You cannot be “slightly” kosher or halal by only eating a small portion of ham." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

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"You are not what you eat; you are what what you eat eats. 1st order vegetarians — cows, Californians, history majors 2nd order vegetarians — eat only 1st order vegetarians: (some) Semitic religions (w/only gras fed chicken), lions. Nonvegetarians: eat porc, crustaceous." -

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom @TalebWisdom]

"Switzerland is the perfect place where you have volatility at a municipal level that nothing up top - small units competing with each other." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom @TalebWisdom]

"Nothing is more permanent than “temporary” arrangements, deficits, truces, and relationships; and nothing is more temporary than “permanent” ones." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom @TalebWisdom]

"Promising someone good luck as a reward for good deeds sounds like a bribe—perhaps the remnant of an archaic, pre-deontic preclassical morality." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom @TalebWisdom]

"There is nothing deemed harmful (in general) that cannot be bene􀀭cial in some particular instances, and nothing deemed beneficial that cannot harm you in some circumstances. The more complex the system, the weaker the notion of Universal." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom @TalebWisdom]

"The idea of #skininthegame is that people judged by reality and P/L, instead of peers or supervisors, are vastly more open-minded." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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"Rituals are the music of life." - Nassim Taleb

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"If someone pays you for anything other than a specific transaction, you are a slave." - Nassim Taleb #slavery

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"Social media are severely antisocial, health foods are empirically unhealthy, knowledge workers are very ignorant, and social sciences aren’t scientific at all." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes https://t.co/gfx7MU8aDt

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"Love of humanity doesn't force you to open your living room to ALL passers by. But you may invite a few. Complex systems are stratified." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb #immigration

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"When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the-game-driven experiential mechanism. They lose control of their preferences, substituting constructed preferences for their own, complicating their lives unnecessarily, triggering their own misery." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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"For soldiers, we use the term “mercenary,” but we absolve employees of responsibility with “everybody needs to make a living.”" - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

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"In order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can’t know) is the central idea of uncertainty." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom @TalebWisdom]

"Skills that transfer: street 􀀵ghts, o􀀼-path hiking, seduction, broad erudition. Skills that don’t: school, games, sports, laboratory — what’s reduced and organized." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom @TalebWisdom]

"The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes https://t.co/gfx7MU8aDt

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom @TalebWisdom]

"Most people need to wait for another person to say “this is beautiful art” to say “this is beautiful art”; some need to wait for two or more." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes https://t.co/gfx7MU8aDt