Knowledge Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

13 Knowledge quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

All Knowledge quotes Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s page

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 13 remarks on knowledge are terse, often paradoxical, and always provocative. He challenges easy assumptions, urging readers to consider uncertainty and the limits of what we think we understand.

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We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Information is bad for knowledge.

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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“My principle activity is to tease those who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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“[T]he worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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“There are traps built into any kind of knowledge gained from observation.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut, and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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“You cannot do anything with knowledge unless you know where it stops, and the costs of using it.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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“So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition—given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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“don’t understand?” is, simply, work on the undesirable states of f(x). It is often easier to modify f(x) than to get better…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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“It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent “studying” the news last month neither…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.

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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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We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb