Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom

📊 Top 10 Most Liked Posts from @TalebWisdom – April 2025 A recap of your favorite Taleb quotes last month: 🧵👇 1. "Missing a train is only painful if you run after it".

"In a crowd of a hundred, 50 percent of the wealth, 90 percent of the imagination, and 100 percent of the intellectual courage will reside in a single person—not necessarily the same one." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes amazon.com/gp/product/198…

"The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

"NATIONALISM: there is an individual, then nation, little above. Causes Wars: outside lives don't exist. FRACTAL LOCALISM: individual ⊂‚ various tribes (family, friends...) ⊂‚ tribes ⊂‚ ... Humanity. NEVER exclusive: One (me) can ⊂‚ Greek & Lebanese tribes+US +Mediterraneism."

"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

"A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Finer men tolerate others’ small inconsistencies though not the large ones; the weak tolerate others’ large inconsistencies though not small ones." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

"The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane: everything else on your eyelids manipulates you with an ad." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

"Marriage is the institutional process of feminizing men—and feminizing women." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes amazon.com/gp/product/198…

"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." -

"The opposite of fascism isn’t a democratic form of socialism; it’s localism." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb #localism

"It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life— with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"What they call “play” (gym, travel, sports) looks like work; the harder they try, the more captive they are." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

"If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead—the more precision, the more dead you are." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes amazon.com/gp/product/198…

"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 amazon.com/gp/product/198…

"A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says “f*** you” to fate." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"The four most infuential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine—and nonperishable—work within institutions." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes amazon.com/gp/product/198…

"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 Taleb

"Modernity inflicts a sucker narrative on activities; now we “walk for exercise,” not “walk” with no justification; for hidden reasons." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

"If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and please don’t listen to music." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

"Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb