A Quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Rationalism crashes in the tails.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Crashes Rationalism Tails

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Lebanese - Scientist
Born: 1960

I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.

Isaac Asimov

Rationalism is the idea that we can ever understand anything about the state of being. It's a deathtrip. It always has been. . . . And if rationalism is a deathtrip, then irrationalism might very well be a lifetrip . . . at least until it proves otherwise.

Stephen King

Some people say it might be good for your career to die and then come back again. I have died many ways, car crashes, motorcycle crashes, etc. But, I am still alive.

Mark-Paul Gosselaar

And I always think of life like a giant wave. You know, it rises and it crests and it flies, and it's just magnificent, and then it crashes. And for a lot of people, when it crashes, that's the end, and they go down the deep, dark hole of depression.

Jane Seymour

One important measurement issue concerns the fat tails problem that I mentioned earlier. VAR is concerned with extreme outcomes. If the tails of the probability distributions we are using are too thin, our VAR measures are likely to be too low.

John Hull

If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal. But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart.

Philip Pullman

I look away at car crashes, and I know people who look away at car crashes, because it makes us uncomfortable to watch other people in pain.

John Mayer

Here is the secret to surviving one of these [airplane] crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit). Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way.

Mary Roach

The term "rational" and its variants (rationality, rationalism) are used in a lot of contexts in economic debate, both positively and negatively, but nearly always sloppily or dishonestly. A specimen I've seen on more occasions than I can count is the line (usually presented with a sense of witty originality) "if you are opposed to economic rationalism, you must be in favor of economic irrationalism"... I've come to the conclusion that the word "rational" has no meaning that cannot better be conveyed by some alternative term and that the best advice is probably to avoid it altogether.

John Quiggin

By sort of combining the research of a lot of smart people, I came up with an equation for dread [dread=uncontrollability+unfamiliarity+imaginability+suffering+scale of destruction+unfairness]. The dread equation is a simplification, but it's a way to explain why we fear something so much when it is so unlikely. Part of it is the lack of control. That's why we're more scared of plane crashes than car crashes even though we know rationally which is more dangerous.

Amanda Ripley

Liberalism is Rationalism in politics.

Francis Parker Yockey

Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.

Alfred North Whitehead

Without the heroic, man has no meaning; without the economic, he has no sense. Economic man is most likely to be economic woman - a good wife, pulling the coat tails of her heroic husband, checking his extravagances of speech and action with words of caution and good sense. But without the heroic coat tails to pull, life for both of them would be dull and savorless indeed.

Kenneth E. Boulding

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails - aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter's reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.

Henry David Thoreau

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

Emile M. Cioran

It would be an endless battle if it were all up to ego because it does not destroy and is not destroyed by itself It is like a wave it makes itself up, it rushes forward getting nowhere really it crashes, withdraws and makes itself up again pulls itself together with pride towers with pride rushes forward into imaginary conquest crashes in frustration withdraws with remorse and repentance pulls itself together with new resolution

Agnes Martin

A Quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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