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The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.

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
Contradict
Afraid
Persons
Person

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.
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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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Only in recent history has working hard signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .
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We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
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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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Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
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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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Don't read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
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It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.
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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
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Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
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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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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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Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.
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Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
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They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns) in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)
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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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I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.
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Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network.
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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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