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Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.

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
Harmed
Defend
Reputation

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
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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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To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
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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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There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient, and a random one. In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Ideas come and go, stories stay.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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
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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
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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Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut, and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history
Nassim Nicholas Taleb