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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: September 11
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Nassim Nicholas Najib Taleb
Nassim Taleb
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More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
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The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.
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Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.
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We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
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Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.
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The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.
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There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.
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They are born, put in a box they go home to live in a box they study by ticking boxes they go to what is called work in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box they talk about thinking outside the box and when they die they are put in a box.
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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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This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
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If you let markets - in general, my belief is that if you let markets give you information, they'll give you the information rather than artificially prop up everything.
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An option hides where we don't want it to hide.
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Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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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.
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.
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I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.
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The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
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Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
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