Nassim Nicholas Taleb — "Never ask a barber if you need a haircut."
Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.
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More from Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"Don't tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio."
"To be a good philosopher, you need to be a good bullshit detector."
"Hotel heuristic: In a new hotel, always reject the first room they give you."
"The more you try to optimize, the more fragile you become."
"The greatest danger in life is not taking risks. It's taking risks without understanding them."
About Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960)
Lebanese-American probabilist and The Black Swan (2007) author whose work on tail risk and antifragility reshaped finance and policy thinking. Closely associated with Benoit Mandelbrot (fractal mathematician, Taleb's mentor figure). For an intellectual contrast, see Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist and The Better Angels of Our Nature author — Taleb has spent the 2010s publicly attacking Pinker's data-driven 'things are getting better' optimism as naive Gaussian thinking under fat-tailed reality — the loudest public statistics argument of the decade.