The problem is architects building structures to impress other architects --but plumbers don't act on impressing other plumbers. Any activity where … - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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The problem is architects building structures to impress other architects --but plumbers don't act on impressing other plumbers. Any activity where agents impress peers (architects, academia) rather than satisfying the needs constituents ends up rotting.

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About Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1 January 1960 in Amioun, Lebanon) is an essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance.

Biography information from Wikiquote · Portrait adapted from Wikimedia Commons, Sarah Josephine Taleb (CC BY)

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Nassim Taleb

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Additional quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We end up populating what we call the intelligentsia with people who are delusional, literally mentally deranged, simply because they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating moderniest slogans stripped of all depth...The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do not harm; even more we will argue, those who don't take risks should never be involved in decision making (p.10).

Their three flaws 1) they think in statics not dynamics 2) they think in low, not high dimensions 3) they think in terms of actions, never interactions....The first flaw is they are incapable in thinking in second steps and unaware of the need of them...The second flaw is that they are also incapable of distinguishing between multidimensional problems and their single dimensional representations. The third flaw is they can't forecast the evolution of those one helps by attaching, or the magnification one gets from feedback. (p.9)

I try to make money infrequently, as infrequently as possible simply because I believe that rare events are not fairly valued, and that the rarer the event, the more undervalued it will be in price.

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Veteran trader Marty O’Connell calls this the firehouse effect. He had observed that firemen with much downtime who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous (they

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