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
"My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously."
"The function of the university is to make the student fall in love with the library."
"A good book gets better on the second reading. A great book on the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading."
"Banks hire dull people and train them to be even more dull."
"The more you try to optimize, the more fragile you become."
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.