Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes
If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Random House, 2007.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (/ˈtɑːləb/; alternatively Nessim or Nissim; born 1960) is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, mathematical statistician, and former option trader and risk analyst, whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan has been described by The Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II.