Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quote

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.

We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were v...

I think, that if the world were a bit more like ComicCon, it would be a better place.

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

Star Trek? I asked her. Really? What? she demanded, bending unnaturally black eyebrows together. There are two kinds of people in the universe, Molly, I said. Star Trek fans and Star Wars fans. This i...

The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this nerdification, to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally...

My classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism...many philistines reduce my ideas to an opposition of...

The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

I wish it were different. I wish that we privileged knowledge in politicians, that the ones who know things didn't have to hide it behind brown pants, and that the know-not-enoughs were laughed all th...

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.