"Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Mathematics See all quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb →

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“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”

“Professor Karl Pearson... devised the first test of nonrandomness... He examined millions of runs of what was called a Monte Carlo ... He discovered... the runs were not purely random. ...Philosophers of statistics call this the reference case problem to explain that there is no true attainable randomness in practice, only in theory.”

“Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.”

“Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.”

“When conflicted between two choices, take neither.”

“Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.”

Resonant Thoughts

"But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using …"

— Sean Reardon

Science

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"Man, I love music. I looked up to producers like Barry White and Isaac Hayes. You know, I was about those guys. Dr. Dre, Michael Jackson, looking at those guys, how they came up, looking at all those …"

— Juicy J

Music1975

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"Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play."

— William Saroyan

Literature1908–1981

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"Sentir mon Cœur is a privilege only granted to the exceptional man — the one who has the ability to find words that exactly express his feelings. … The value of words help to define the feeling itself…"

— Herbert Read

Literature1893–1968

#success