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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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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
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Personal
Narrated
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More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism
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It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
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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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It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.
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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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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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Only the autodidacts are free.
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You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
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.
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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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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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We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options ... I am an options trader, and I don't understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them?
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Alan Greenspan is unskilled you don't take the unskilled seriously.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.
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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It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this nerdification, to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb