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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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 ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Only in recent history has 'working hard' signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Economics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb