Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.
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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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The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
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Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
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Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
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Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese.
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We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.
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Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.
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An option hides where we don't want it to hide.
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Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients - and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.
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Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
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The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.
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Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession.
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A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.
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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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History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, ... The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.
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There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.
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I try to make money infrequently, as infrequently as possible simply because I believe that rare events are not fairly valued, and that the rarer the event, the more undervalued it will be in price.
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You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.