"I reject a sole time series of the past as an indication of future performance; I need a lot more than data."

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

"Dear brothers and sisters … we cannot but recall the crimes of these criminal throughout history. … Why did France, in 1253, expel and uproot the Jewish entity which was represented by the ghetto? Why…"

— Mahmoud al-Zahar

Politics1945

#time

"Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information."

— Mary L. Trump

Politics1965

#time

"Our foreign policy was an improvisation. Like Schacht's financial policy, it lacked foresight. The Nazis kept talking about a thousand-year Reich, but they couldn't think ahead for five minutes!"

— Paul Schmidt

Technology1898–1976

#time