"Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average."
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Quote collection
Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes (page 2 of 18)
342 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them."
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"Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand."
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"Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad - at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity."
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"They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)"
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"The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare."
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"The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent."
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"Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant."
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"If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud."
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"People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide."
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"Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet."
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"Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love."
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"People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up"
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"The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free"
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"Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability."
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"Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura ."
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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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"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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"Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general."
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"It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness."
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