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

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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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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Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.
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Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.
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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
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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.
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If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.
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When I trade, I don't have an agency problem I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it's not his neck on the line.
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Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
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They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns) in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)
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What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The bonus for bankers fragilizes the system. Someone has the upside at the expense of others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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An option hides where we don't want it to hide.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense
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They are born, put in a box they go home to live in a box they study by ticking boxes they go to what is called work in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box they talk about thinking outside the box and when they die they are put in a box.
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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.
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Someone who says I am busy is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb