Quote

Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

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
Dumb
Thanks
Smart
Rather
Better
Largely
Time
Fragile
Thinking
Aggressive
Extremely

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Anything organic requires some dose of variability so it can adapt all the time, and fixing things is not a good idea.
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Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
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Only the autodidacts are free.
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To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
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I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.
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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.
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But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.
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The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference
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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.
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We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible we scorn the abstract.
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Don't read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
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I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.
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When I trade, I don't have an agency problem I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it's not his neck on the line.
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A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see
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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.
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Don't disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don't understand their logic. Don't pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific 'evidence'.
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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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The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane.
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Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
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Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.
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