Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Talebis a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by the Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II...
NationalityLebanese
ProfessionScientist
CountryLebanon
Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes about
order perfect world
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.
technology guy noise
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.
writing two lunch
If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.
ideas greek arrogance
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.
stress anger relief
When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.
offending people nerd
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse
luck equalizer
Luck is the grand equalizer.
wit seducing nerdiness
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
wise smart school
I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.
loss sarcasm mind
The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.
nerd definitions aphorism
My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism
interesting dating people
What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.
vision special blind
A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see
humility marketing surprise
true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing