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The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
We tend to use knowledge as therapy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
For the robust, an error is information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say: I don’t know....
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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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There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. (page 85)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb