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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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More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically - while bankers strike it rich.
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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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them nerdiness the reverse
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Ideas come and go, stories stay.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.
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 best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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You get pseudo-order when you seek order you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.
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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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
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We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Alan Greenspan is unskilled you don't take the unskilled seriously.
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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Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb