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When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: September 11
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Economist
Essayist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Statistician
University Teacher
Writer
Nassim Nicholas Najib Taleb
Nassim Taleb
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More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull - you don't even know how many sides the dice have!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible we scorn the abstract.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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
The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
