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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
Realism
Worse
Punishing
Skepticism

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Love without sacrifice is like theft
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Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.
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Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur
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A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.
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Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.
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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.
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It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
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Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.
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Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.
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Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
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Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.
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It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag , a few speeches, and a national anthem to this day I avoid the label Lebanese, preferring the less restrictive Levantine designation.
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Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
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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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When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
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Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
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The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.
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Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
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The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.
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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.
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