Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Isn’t it strange to see an event happening precisely because it was not supposed to happen? What kind of defense do we have against that? Whatever you come to know (that New York is an easy terrorist target, for instance) may become inconsequential if your enemy knows that you know it. It may be odd that, in such a strategic game, what you know can be truly inconsequential."
33 Quotes
"Isn’t it strange to see an event happening precisely because it was not supposed to happen? What kind of defense do we have against that? Whatever you come to know (that New York is an easy terrorist target, for instance) may become inconsequential if your enemy knows that you know it. It may be odd that, in such a strategic game, what you know can be truly inconsequential."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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"Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
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"“If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.”"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
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"What I learned on my own I still remember"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
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"They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
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"If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
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"“Things always become obvious after the fact”"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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"We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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"We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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"The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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"All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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"We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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"The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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"The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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"I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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"I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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"I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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"Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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"Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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