Nassim Nicholas Taleb — "When I die, I want the highest number of firemen, risk takers, & other real peop…"
When I die, I want the highest number of firemen, risk takers, & other real people and the smallest number of academics to attend my funeral.
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More from Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"The only way to be a philosopher is to practice what you preach—and the only way to practice what you preach is to be a philosopher."
"The intellectual is someone who uses big words to hide small ideas."
"Those with brains and no balls become mathematicians, those with balls and no brains join the mafia, those with no balls and no brains become economists, and those with balls and brains become entrepr…"
"Some people are only funny when they try to be serious."
"If you hear a 'prominent' economist using the word 'equilibrium', or 'normal distribution', do not argue with him; just ignore him."
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.