Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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What they call 'play' (gym, travel, sports) looks like work.
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Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
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A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.
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What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.
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Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.
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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
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I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.
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You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.
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There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)-likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher ...
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It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag, a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label 'Lebanese,' preferring the less restrictive 'Levantine' designation.
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Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.
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When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
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Economics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)
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You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race.
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It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.
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People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.
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Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
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Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.
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I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or 'incentives' for skill.
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Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.
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Only in recent history has 'working hard' signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.
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Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.
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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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They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called 'work' in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking 'outside the box'; and when they die they are put in a box.