Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, not even a spectrum of possible explanations.
While we know that history flows forward, it is difficult to realize that we envision it backward. Why is it so?
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 are employed, hence dependent on other people’s judgment, looking busy can help you claim responsibility for the results in a random environment. The appearance of busyness reinforces the per...
When things go our way we reject the lack of certainty.
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 matters isn't what a person has or doesn't have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.
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 laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day
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).
To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher,
To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
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 this error of thinking that things always have a reason that is accessible to us—that we can comprehend easily.
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 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 principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do no harm (primum non nocere); even more, we will argue, those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions.