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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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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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Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits.
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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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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If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Only the autodidacts are free.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Love without sacrifice is like theft
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or incentives for skill.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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They are born, put in a box they go home to live in a box they study by ticking boxes they go to what is called work in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box they talk about thinking outside the box and when they die they are put in a box.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.
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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Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.
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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I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb