Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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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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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 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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The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.
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You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
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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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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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The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.
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Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
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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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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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An option hides where we don't want it to hide.
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Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession.
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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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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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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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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.