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Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: September 11
Author
Economist
Essayist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Statistician
University Teacher
Writer
Nassim Nicholas Najib Taleb
Nassim Taleb
People
Sceptical
Gullible
Wrong
Things

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Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.
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Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.
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Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
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Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it's closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.
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Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.
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My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.
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Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.
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You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system.
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Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.
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Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
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You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.
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Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.
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Love without sacrifice is like theft
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It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
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Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.
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I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington.
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Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.
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true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others the rest is either shyness or good marketing
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When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
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I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.
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