Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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).
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Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
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Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
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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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Economics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)
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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
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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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A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.
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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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An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
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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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The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.
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Economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. (page 85)
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It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.
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A theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
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If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
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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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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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Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.
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It is painful to think about ruthlessness as an engine of improvement.
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Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.
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Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.