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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
Replaced
Lawyer
Ethics
Law
Good
Modernity
More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Anything organic requires some dose of variability so it can adapt all the time, and fixing things is not a good idea.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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
Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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
Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Alan Greenspan is unskilled you don't take the unskilled seriously.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
