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The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

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
Different
Think
Thinking
World
Vastly
Live

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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If you let markets - in general, my belief is that if you let markets give you information, they'll give you the information rather than artificially prop up everything.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or incentives for skill.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this nerdification, to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality - without exploiting them for fun and profit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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
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As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad - at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient, and a random one. In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb