Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Nassim Taleb quotes

From Antifragile:
To repeat (it is necessary to repeat because intellectuals tends to forget it), evidence of absence is not absence of evidence, a simple point that has the following implications: for the antifragile, good news tends to be absent from past data, and for the fragile it is the bad news that doesn’t show easily. 
 
In the antifragile case (of positive asymmetries, positive Black Swan businesses), such as trial and error, the sample track record will tend to underestimate the long-term average; it will hide the qualities, not the defects. 
 
In the fragile case of negative asymmetries (turkey problems), the sample track record will tend to underestimate the long-term average; it will hide the defects and display the qualities.