The scientist’s behavior while facing the refutation of his ideas has been studied in depth as part of the so-called attribution bias. You attribute your successes to skills, but your failures to rand...
The occurrence of a highly improbable event is the equivalent of the nonoccurrence of a highly probable one
The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history
The difference between a trader and an investor lies in the duration of the bet, and the corresponding size. There
The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown,...
The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right.
Systems learn by removing parts, via negativa.*4
Stalin could not have existed in a municipality.
Robert Rubin, a former Secretary of the United States Treasury, one of those who sign their names on the banknote you just used to pay for coffee, collected more than $120 million in compensation from...
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow...
Only he who is free with his time is free with his opinion.
Never cross a river if it is on average four feet deep
Needless to say that the ideas of this book fall squarely into the Tragic category: We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to o...
Light control works; close control leads to overreaction, sometimes causing the machinery to break into pieces. In a famous paper On Governors, published in 1867, Maxwell modeled the behavior and show...
Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it.
But we have evidence that collectively society doesn’t advance with organized education, rather the reverse: the level of (formal) education in a country is the result of wealth.*2
The Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.
That very rare ability called imagination, that rarer quality called courage, and who make things happen.
Keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.
Interventionism depletes mental and economic resources; it is rarely available when it is needed the most.