Quote

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.

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
Complicated
Dice
Method
Probability
Mere
Methods
Ignorance
Odds
Development
Dealing
Knowledge
Certainty
Acceptance
Variants
Lack
Computation

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.
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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.
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I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.
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It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag , a few speeches, and a national anthem to this day I avoid the label Lebanese, preferring the less restrictive Levantine designation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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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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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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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Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this nerdification, to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
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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Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb