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Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.

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
Blindfolded
Bus
Drive
Please
School

More quotes by 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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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
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We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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
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Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.
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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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
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Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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A washing machine needs constant maintenance. It doesn't want any harm. It wants tranquility, and you need someone to - you're not going to harm it by continuously monitoring it and adjusting it.
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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A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb