4 Quotes & Sayings By Nassim Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a writer, trader and philosopher. He is professor of risk engineering at the University of New York's PhD program in risk engineering. He is also a principal at Universa Investments. One of the world's leading authorities on decision-making under uncertainty, Taleb has been called "the world's most famous polymath" by The Economist and "the most interesting man in the world" by Steven Pinker Read more

He is the author of Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (2001), The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012) and Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (2014). In 2015 his book, The Bed of Procrustes, was published by Random House. After many years spent as a trader and an academic, Taleb started writing books again because he was frustrated with other people's misunderstanding of what a trader does and a philosopher thinks.

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At the Harvard Symposium for Hard Problems in Social Science , Emily Osterpresented a very simple, elementary problem: almost all people with type-2diabetes who are overweight can be cured by losing a little bit of weight. They aremade aware of it, yet they usually gain weight a�er diagnosis (she mentioned" Atkins" among the options, so it was not just AMA low-fat.). It is so obvious thatwe know what to do yet do not carry the action because thinking can be largelyornamental. The proof of the sterility of (a significant class of) knowledgesterility of (a significant class of) knowledge was rightthere (among the obvious evidence that the population has been gaining weight inspire of technological and educational progress). Yet the others social scientistskept exalting the value of "education" in spite of this simple devastating evidence. Someone even suggested teaching more "critical thinking". This is the great suckerproblem: people who teach truly think that teaching, or, worse, preaching, cures. . Nassim Taleb
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We see the world as less random than it actually is. Nassim Taleb
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The person you're most afraid to contradict is yourself. Nassim Taleb