Nassim Nicholas Taleb — "The more you try to optimize, the more fragile you become."
The more you try to optimize, the more fragile you become.
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More from Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"The three most addictive substances on earth are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary."
"Never trust a wage slave."
"Modernity: we created a system where people are judged by their ability to tell stories rather than by their ability to deliver results."
"If you want to be free, learn to say no."
"A good book gets better on the second reading. A great book on the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading."
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.