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I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18.

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
Common
Einstein
Sense
Misconception
Nothing
Remarks
Acquired
Collection
Collections
Remind
Misconceptions
Age
Remark

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
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Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.
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The bonus for bankers fragilizes the system. Someone has the upside at the expense of others.
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Someone who says I am busy is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
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What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns) in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)
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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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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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If you don't feel that you haven't read enough, you haven't read enough.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb