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 Erasmus called ingratitudo vulgi, the ingratitude of the masses, is increasing in the age of globalization and the Internet.
We grossly overestimate the length of the effect of misfortune on our lives. You think that the loss of your fortune or current position will be devastating, but you are probably wrong. More likely, y...
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...
Their three flaws: 1) they think in statics not dynamics, 2) they think in low, not high, dimensions, 3) they think in terms of actions, never interactions.
The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.
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 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...
The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention.
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...
Someone with a high public presence who is controversial and takes risks for his opinion is less likely to be a bullshit vendor.
Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside
Rational flâneur (or just flâneur): Someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his destination) so he can imbibe things based on new inf...
Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept. However,
Our problem is not just that we do not know the future, we do not know much of the past either. We
Note that I am not relying in this book on the beastly method of collecting selective corroborating evidence. ...I call this overload of examples naïve empiricism--successions of anecdotes selected to...