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You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

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
Collective
Rules
Wants
Technology
Point
Castration
Jobs
Idiosyncratic
School
Generic
Collectives

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
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Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.
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It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
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The bonus for bankers fragilizes the system. Someone has the upside at the expense of others.
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It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.
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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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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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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
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Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
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
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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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A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others the rest is either shyness or good marketing
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Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference
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To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb