Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
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A system, artificially stabilized, and of course you have hidden risks under the surface, and you don't know where the risks are.
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Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.
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Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea.
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But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.
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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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We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. [...] We take what we know a little too seriously.
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Make sure that you are in a situation where the constant mistakes are small and can be used for something.
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I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.
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Things always become obvious after the fact
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People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.
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At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.
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People work out, they stress their body, and their body gets stronger from stress.
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Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
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Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically - while bankers strike it rich.
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My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism
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You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.
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The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds
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Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
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Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.
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If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.
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It is much harder to become independent if you are wealthy than to become wealthy if you are independent.
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Don't read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
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Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.
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Learn to fail with pride - and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error - by mastering the error part.
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My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates-and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain.
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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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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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Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.
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Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.
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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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