Humans Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

16 Humans quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

All Humans quotes Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s page

Taleb’s terse observations cut through complacency, offering a succinct look at how uncertainty shapes our collective behavior.

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Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.

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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If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent.…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness…

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…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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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;…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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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…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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More by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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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…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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“Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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“One needs to go out and buy a lottery ticket in order to win. Does it mean that the work involved in the trip…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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“If you are looking for your misplaced wallet in your living room, in a trial and error mode, you exercise rationality by not looking…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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“Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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