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The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.

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
Courage
Respect
Stand
Erudition
Half
Traits
Men
Idiot
Reputation
Intelligent
Afraid

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If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.
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Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.
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Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.
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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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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.
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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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Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.
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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.
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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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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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Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.
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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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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them nerdiness the reverse
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Don't disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don't understand their logic. Don't pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific 'evidence'.
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When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.
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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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You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave you also need to avoid becoming a master.
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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.
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Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad - at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.
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Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
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