The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!
The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now
The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding,
The answer is that there are two varieties of rare events: a) the narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and b) thos...
The Procrustean bed in life consists precisely in simplifying the non-linear and making it linear—the simplification that distorts.
The French writer Edmond About, who visited Greece in 1832, a dozen years after its independence, reports how peasants struggled with the metric system as it was completely unnatural to them and stuck...
The French thinker and poet Paul Valery was surprised to listen to a commentary of his poems that found meanings that had until then escaped him (of course, it was pointed out to him that these were i...
The Black Swans we imagine, discuss, and worry about do not resemble those likely to be Black Swans. We worry about the wrong improbable events, as
Statin drugs are meant to lower cholesterol in your blood. But there is an asymmetry, and a severe one. One needs to treat fifty high risk persons for five years to avoid a single cardiovascular event...
So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition—given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily.
Ricordate questa massima: non sto dicendo che le tecnologie non invecchiano, ma solo che le tecnologie che tendevano a invecchiare sono già morte.
Recall that the Platonic fold is where our representation of reality ceases to apply—but we do not know it.
Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
Paris itself was barely controlled by France—no more than the Rio slums called favelas are currently ruled by the Brazilian central state.
One day in the 1980s I had dinner with a famous speculator, a hugely successful man. He muttered the hyperbole that hit home: much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.
Nu căutați ceea ce este precis și local. Nu fiți îngust la minte. Marele descoperitor Pasteur, care a venit cu ideea că norocul îl favorizează pe cel pregătit, a înțeles că pentru a lăsa contingența s...
No one in particular is a good predictor of anything. Sorry.
Light control works; close control leads to overreaction,
Le processus de la découverte (ou de l’innovation, ou du progrès technologique) dépend lui-même d’un bricolage antifragile, d’une brusque prise de risques plutôt que d’une culture formelle.
Just as in matters of seduction, people lend the most to those who need them the least.