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Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

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
Punishing
Skepticism
Realism
Worse

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You get pseudo-order when you seek order you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.
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What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.
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I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.
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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.
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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.
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Love without sacrifice is like theft
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Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.
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Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
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Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network.
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Don't disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don't understand their logic. Don't pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific 'evidence'.
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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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You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
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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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People focus on role models it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up
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The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.
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I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.
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You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.
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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.
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Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it's closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.
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When I trade, I don't have an agency problem I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it's not his neck on the line.
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