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We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
The casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known, Gaussian (i.e., bell-curve), and almost computable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Randomness works well in search-sometimes better than humans.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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 -
Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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