Nassim Nicholas Taleb — "The most important quality for a scientist is to be willing to say 'I don't know…"
The most important quality for a scientist is to be willing to say 'I don't know.'
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More from Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don't want to resemble when you grow up."
"Looks like the only people who do not think that economists are bullshitters are economists."
"The only way to be truly free is to be financially independent."
"Never trust a statistician."
"If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don't do it. Obvious decisions (robust to error) …"
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.