"Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant."

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

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More by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“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

"Rhetoric is a dangerous art. It is the manipulation of the difference, one might say the distance, between truth and image And in our times, that distance has become the means by which power is exerci…"

— Nick Drake (poet)

Literature1948–1974

#power

"There is little in common between the organised parading of madness in the eighteenth century and the freedom with which madness came to the fore during the Renaissance. The earlier age had found it e…"

— Michel Foucault

Literature1926–1984

#freedom

"A little distance had opened between us, almost unnoticed, rarely acknowledged. We made love infrequently. The couch was for sleep at the end of exhausting days. I confided in her less often. Perhaps …"

— Nick Drake (poet)

Literature1948–1974

#knowledge

"How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity —in short: what mathematicians call "elegance"— are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and…"

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

Science1930–2002

#success