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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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Economist
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Philosopher
Statistician
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Nassim Nicholas Najib Taleb
Nassim Taleb
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More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient, and a random one. In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.
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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
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Anything organic requires some dose of variability so it can adapt all the time, and fixing things is not a good idea.
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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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We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
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People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.
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To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
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Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.
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I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington.
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If you're going to fail, you'd rather fail early than fail late in general.
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You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.
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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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Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.
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I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.
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Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense
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Only the autodidacts are free.
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I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or incentives for skill.
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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
