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A man is morally free when... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
The mortgage crisis is a clear instance of consumers who needed protection. There was predatory lending to people who didn't know what they were doing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Someone who says 'I am busy' is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Simplicity is not so simple to attain.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes -fragile otherwise.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The key to wealth is that it doesn't matter. Once you've had it, you don't think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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 -
Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb