What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.
The very idea of exercise is to gain from antifragility to workout stressors—as we saw, all kinds of exercise are just exploitations of convexity effects.
The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with th...
The problem of lumpy payoffs is not so much in the lack of income they entail, but the pecking order, the loss of dignity, the subtle humiliations near the watercooler.
The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.
The first heuristic addresses the asymmetry in rewards and punishment, or transfer of fragility between individuals. Ralph Nader has a simple rule: people voting for war need to have at least one desc...
Some business bets in which one wins big but infrequently, yet loses small but frequently, are worth making if others are suckers for them and if you have the personal and intellectual stamina.
Should we go into people’s inner and private thoughts and motivations, we would see that their wishes and hopes are almost invariably at someone else’s expense.
Science isn't the sum of what scientists think, but exactly as with markets. Had science operated by majority consensus, we would be still stuck in the Middle Ages.
Sanallinen uhka on aidon voimattomuuden sertifikaatti.
Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.
Randomness can be of considerable help with the matter. For there is another, far more entertaining way to make the distinction between the babbler and the thinker. You can sometimes replicate somethi...
Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future. But that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Erg...
People with too much smoke and complicated tricks and methods in their brains start missing elementary, very elementary things. Persons in the real world can’t afford to miss these things; otherwise t...
One general, Fabius Maximus was nicknamed Cunctator, the Procrastinator. He drove Hannibal, who had an obvious military superiority, crazy by avoiding and delaying engagement.
Never ask people what they want, or where they want to go, or where they think they should go, or, worse, what they think they will desire tomorrow.
Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification t...
Many claim that caloric restriction (permanent or episodic) activates healthy reactions and switches that, among other benefits, lengthen life expectancy in laboratory animals. We humans live too long...
Makridakis and Hibon reached the sad conclusion that statistically sophisticated or complex methods do not necessarily provide more accurate forecasts than simpler ones.
Luck favors the prepared, Pasteur