Quote

Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.

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
May
Table
Tables
Measure
Using
Confidence
Wittgenstein
Unless
Reliability
Use
Ruler
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Rulers

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If you don't feel that you haven't read enough, you haven't read enough.
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Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.
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You never win an argument until they attack your person.
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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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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!
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Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.
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Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.
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Simplicity is not so simple to attain.
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History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.
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We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.
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Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
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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.
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It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.
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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
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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
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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.
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You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.
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Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.
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A washing machine needs constant maintenance. It doesn't want any harm. It wants tranquility, and you need someone to - you're not going to harm it by continuously monitoring it and adjusting it.
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Alan Greenspan is unskilled you don't take the unskilled seriously.
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