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[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.

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
Theory
Dangerous
Thing

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
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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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Paul Krugman is a danger to society!
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The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
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Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Love without sacrifice is like theft
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).
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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Someone who says I am busy is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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It's harder to say 'no' when you really mean it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
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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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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If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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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Only in recent history has working hard signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .
Nassim Nicholas Taleb