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Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
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
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Sceptical
Large
Scepticism
Small
Costly
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Imperfect
Human
Aesthetic
Humans
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Matter
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Consequence
More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.
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Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.
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People focus on role models it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up
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Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.
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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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Only the autodidacts are free.
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If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
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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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The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
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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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I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18.
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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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But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.
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Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.
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It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.
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I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
