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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
Persons
Person
Contradict
Afraid

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The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
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A competitive athlete is painful to look at trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.
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The book is the only medium left that hasn't been corrupted by the profane.
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Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.
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Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.
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We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible we scorn the abstract.
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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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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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I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged.
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I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.
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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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I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.
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To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.
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Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.
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Simplicity is not so simple to attain.
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Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it's closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.
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Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.
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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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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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Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.
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