Whenever you hear a snotty (and frustrated) European middlebrow presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as uncultured, unintellectual, and poor in math because, unlike...
When you don’t have debt you don’t care about your reputation in economics circles—and somehow it is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just as in matters...
What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism.
What the French call the caviar left, la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists, are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political system with sumpt...
What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment.
We notice what varies and changes more than what plays a large role but doesn’t change. We
We live to produce information, or improve on it. Nietzsche had the Latin pun aut liberi, aut libri—either children or books, both information that caries through the centuries…I am here to die a hero...
We ingest probiotics because we don’t eat enough dirt anymore.
We have to accept the fuzziness of the familiar because no matter how queasy it makes us feel (and it does makes us queasy to remove the analgesic illusion of causality).
We have always been crazy but weren't skilled enough to destroy the world. Now we can.
Traders, when they make profits, have short communications; when they lose they drown you in details, theories, and charts.
To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher,
This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was—or is.
This is the reason I put social science theories in the left column of the Triad, as something superfragile for real-world decisions and unusable for risk analyses. The very designation theory is even...
This chapter has two topics. First, we are demonstrably arrogant about what we think we know. We certainly know a lot, but we have a built-in tendency to think that we know a little bit more than we a...
There is one world in which I believe the habit of mistaking luck for skill is most prevalent—and most conspicuous—and that is the world of markets. By
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separa...
The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it get to live w...
The turkey problem can be generalized to any situation where the same hand that feeds you can be the one that wrings your neck. Consider
The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, aggressive risk bearing rather than formal education.