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Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.

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
Modernity
Replaced
Lawyer
Ethics
Law
Good

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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.
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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Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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A competitive athlete is painful to look at trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.
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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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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Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.
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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Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb