"I have organized my career and business in such a way as to... benefit... I am profiting from the rare event, with asymmetric bets."

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.”

“When conflicted between two choices, take neither.”

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

“Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound; great debts are like cannon, of loud noise but little danger."

— Samuel Johnson

Literature1709–1784

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"So I’m unequivocal on this. If somebody is a law-abiding citizen who is going about their business, and working in a job, an obeying the traffic signs and doing all the other things that good citizens…"

— Barack Obama

Politics1961

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"Defined simply, innovation is, of course, the introduction of something new. We presume that the purpose of introducing something new into a process is to bring about major, radical change. Process in…"

— Thomas H. Davenport

Economics1954

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"In its current form UML is designed to support a wide variety of different modelling techniques and formalisms. This is evident, for example, in the state machine formalism which allows both Moore and…"

— Stephen J. Mellor

Science1952

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