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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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If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.
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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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I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.
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There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.
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Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
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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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For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
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By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.
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The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
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If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.
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A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
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The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.
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When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
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Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
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Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
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Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.
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You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave you also need to avoid becoming a master.
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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.
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You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system.
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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.
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