Quote

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.

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
Machines
Monitoring
Constant
Adjusting
Wants
Continuously
Doesn
Maintenance
Someone
Washing
Need
Tranquility
Needs
Machine
Going
Harm

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.
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Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.
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Simplicity is not so simple to attain.
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A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
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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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Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.
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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.
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When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.
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Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
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If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters.
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Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.
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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.
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Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
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If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.
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When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.
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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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I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.
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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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Paul Krugman is a danger to society!
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Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.
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