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Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination
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Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools - by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category.
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Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems.
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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.
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The antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility—and sacrifice—of the lower one.
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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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Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
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It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.
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True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing
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I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism
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You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.
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Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.
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Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
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Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
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Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.
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The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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We learn the most from fools... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.
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Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.
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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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We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
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The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
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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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An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Creative Commons
Born:
1960
(age 64)
Bio:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.
Known for:
Antifragile (2012)
The Bed of Procrustes (2016)
Dynamic Hedging (1997)
Most used words:
people
life
control
understand
risk
box
randomness
science
robust
worst
modern
knowledge
random
man
modernity
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