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My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism

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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Aphorism
Nerd
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Definitions
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More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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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!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows a journalist or consultant the opposite.
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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Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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People focus on role models it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb