Nassim Nicholas Taleb — "The most reliable way to tell if someone is stupid is if they're an academic who…"
The most reliable way to tell if someone is stupid is if they're an academic who's successful in their field.
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More from Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet."
"Someone who says 'I am busy' is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you."
"Never trust a man who reads the newspaper to get information. Trust the one who reads it to find out what opinions are being pushed."
"A BS detection heuristic would be to use education in reverse: hire, conditional on an equal set of skills, the person with the least label-oriented education. In addition, people who didn't go to Har…"
"The more you try to explain something, the less people understand it."
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.
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