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.
Epistemology,
Cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.
You do not want to win an argument. You want to win.
You are rich if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.
What Erasmus called ingratitudo vulgi, the ingratitude of the masses, is increasing in the age of globalization and the Internet.
We build toys. Some of those toys change the world.
This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can’t know) is the central idea of uncertainty.
This book is the synthesis of, on one hand, the no-nonsense practitioner of uncertainty who spent his professional life trying to resist being fooled by randomness and trick the emotions associated wi...
The strength of the computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs was precisely in distrusting market research and focus groups— those based on asking people what they want—and following his own imagination. His m...
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 minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether - when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency...
The difference between a trader and an investor lies in the duration of the bet, and the corresponding size. There
The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom. He did not use the notion of the Procruste...
Take the following potent and less-is-more-style argument by the rogue economist Ha-Joon Chang. In 1960 Taiwan had a much lower literacy rate than the Philippines and half the income per person; today...
Stoicism, seen this way, becomes pure robustness—for the attainment of a state of immunity from one’s external circumstances, good or bad, and an absence of fragility to decisions made by fate, is rob...
Silent evidence pervades everything connected to the notion of . By history, I don't mean just those learned-but-dull books in the history section (with Renaissance paintings on their cover to attract...