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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
Academia
Prostitution
Knowledge
Love

More quotes by 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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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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I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
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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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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Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.
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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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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Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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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Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
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