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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
Author
Economist
Essayist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Statistician
University Teacher
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Nassim Nicholas Najib Taleb
Nassim Taleb
Asks
Barber
Knowledge
Barbers
Whether
Haircut
Doe
Haircuts
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Academic
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Relevant
Limits
Ignorance
More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
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The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.
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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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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
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.
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Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically - while bankers strike it rich.
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Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.
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Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.
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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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Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same the antifragile gets better.
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What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment.
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Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.
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Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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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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If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.
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Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
