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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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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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More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient, and a random one. In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
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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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The bonus for bankers fragilizes the system. Someone has the upside at the expense of others.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.
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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The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb