fieldus

The visionaries: Meet the men who predicted the crash - Profiles, People - The Independent

…I say listen to negative rather than positive advice. When you go to a book store there are plenty of publications telling you how to get rich, but none telling you how not to go bankrupt. To put it another way, if you want to get rich, avoid being poor. Negative advice is more robust than positive advice; it is rarely respected, though, unless you present it in a digestible form. For instance, various journalists recently asked me my opinion of the financial crisis, and I said I didn’t know. All I said is that the banks are being piloted by people who know a lot less about the risks than they think they do. That’s negative advice.

from an interview with Nassim Taleb.