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
Constant
Adjusting
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Continuously
Doesn
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Someone
Washing
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Tranquility
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Machine
Going
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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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Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
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You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.
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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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Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
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Stoicism is about the *domestication* of emotions, not their elimination.
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For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
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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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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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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.
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Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.
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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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What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.
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Don't disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don't understand their logic. Don't pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific 'evidence'.
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Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.
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A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
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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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There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.
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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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Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.
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