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I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

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
Always
Observes
Variance
Returns
Remind
Combination
Return
Best

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.
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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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Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
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Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.
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Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.
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Alan Greenspan is unskilled you don't take the unskilled seriously.
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Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
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A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
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Anything that provides you with very, very stable income, very stable conditions, maybe generally stable, that often, it masks real risks, risks of blow-ups.
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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.
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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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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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If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.
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What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.
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[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
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When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
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Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense
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It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.
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Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.
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The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.
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