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Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

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
Prostitution
Knowledge
Love
Academia

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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A washing machine needs constant maintenance. It doesn't want any harm. It wants tranquility, and you need someone to - you're not going to harm it by continuously monitoring it and adjusting it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.
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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We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible we scorn the abstract.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Stoicism is about the *domestication* of emotions, not their elimination.
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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true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others the rest is either shyness or good marketing
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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When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Only the autodidacts are free.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.
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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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb