"It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American New York University professor, essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist. His work concerns problems of randomness, probability, complexity, and uncertainty.
"Professor Karl Pearson... devised the first test of nonrandomness... He examined millions of runs of what was called a Monte Carlo (the old name for a roulette wheel)... He discovered... the runs were not purely random. ...Philosophers of statistics call this the reference case problem to explain that there is no true attainable randomness in practice, only in theory."
"When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure."
"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...."
"You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race."
"[H]istory cannot lend itself to experimentation. But... is potent enough... to eventually bury the bad guy. Bad trades catch up with you... Mathematicians of probability give that a... name: . [R]oughly... properties of a very... long sample path would be similar to the Monte Carlo properties of an average of shorter ones. ...Those unlucky... in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool... would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each ...would revert to his long-term properties."
"My models showed that ultimately almost nobody really survived; bears dropped like flies in the rally and bulls ended up being slaughtered... But there was one exception... option buyers... could buy the insurance against blowup..."