Quote

When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

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
Asks
Robust
Strong
Solid
Something
Disorder
People
Fragile
Opposite
Opposites
Gains
Adaptable
Tend
Resilient

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By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.
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I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.
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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.
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There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.
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To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
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Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
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Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.
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Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
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Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.
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Only in recent history has working hard signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .
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Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.
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My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism
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We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
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Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
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To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.
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Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
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Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.
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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any.
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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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