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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

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
Errors
Though
Less
Someone
Made
Sinned
Never
Reliable
Error
Plenty

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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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The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.
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What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment.
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The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
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Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
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My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.
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Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.
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I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.
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The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference
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Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut, and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant.
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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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Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same the antifragile gets better.
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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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It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.
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The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane.
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The bonus for bankers fragilizes the system. Someone has the upside at the expense of others.
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Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
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Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.
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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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Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad - at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.
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