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Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.

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
Journalist
Unless
Trust
Mother
Never

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started in the investment business (in place of going to dental school), rather than on their ability to produce profits.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality - without exploiting them for fun and profit
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb