Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside
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...
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,
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...
Luck favors the prepared, Pasteur said,
It was calculated that actors who win an Oscar tend to live on average about five years longer than their peers who don’t.
Increasingly, data can only truly deliver via negativa–style knowledge—it can be effectively used to debunk, not confirm.
I had time to kill at the airport and it was a great opportunity for me to buy dark European chocolate, especially since I have managed to successfully convince myself that airport calories don’t coun...
History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.
Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore less...
Antifragile shows how people confuse risk of ruin with variations and fluctuations—a simplification that violates a deeper, more rigorous logic of things.
إن التصنيف حاجة ضرورية بالنسبة للبشر ، لكنه يصبح حالة مرَضية عندما يجري النظر إلى الفئة المصنفة نظرة تقريرية قاطعة ، الأمر الذي يمنع الناس من التفكير في ضبابية الحدود الموضوعة بين الناس والمجتمعات ، خ...
Our misunderstanding of the Black Swan can be largely attributed to our using System 1, i.e., narratives,
Matters are far worse: we may have no less of a problem with phony skepticism.
It is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.
Follows: to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself. If
Anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.
You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.