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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

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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
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Chaos
Anything
Models
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Infinite
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Theory
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Precision
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World
Future
Phenomena
Perfect
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I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.
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The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history
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Love without sacrifice is like theft
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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!
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Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
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Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.
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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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For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
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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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We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
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History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.
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A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.
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Stoicism is about the *domestication* of emotions, not their elimination.
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Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.
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The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
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I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.
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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.
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The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
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Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
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The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started in the investment business (in place of going to dental school), rather than on their ability to produce profits.
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