Je préférerais être bête et antifragile qu’extrêmement intelligent et fragile, à n’importe quel moment.
It is always convenient to invoke universalism when you are in the majority.
Imagine taking a test knowing the answer. While we know that history flows forward, it is difficult to realize that we envision it backward. Why is it so? We will discuss the point in Chapter 11 but h...
If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don’t take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.
Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick...
History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.
Further, many writers and scholars speak in private, say, after half a bottle of wine, differently from the way they do in print. Their writing is certifiably fake, fake. And many of the problems of s...
Artisans, say, taxi drivers, prostitutes (a very, very old profession), carpenters, plumbers, tailors, and dentists, have some volatility in their income but they are rather robust to a minor professi...
If you think that you can control your emotions, think that some people also believe that they can control their heartbeat or hair growth.)
Luck is the grand equalizer.
With a Latin saying that sophistication is born out of hunger (artificia docuit fames).
Way too many cooks in the same tiny kitchen, most of whom never have to taste the food.
Today we depend on the press for such essentially human things as gossip and anecdotes and we care about the private lives of people in very remote places.
The following simple exercise concerning the prediction of the movements of billiard balls on a table. I use the example as computed by the mathematician Michael Berry. If you know a set of basic para...
That the Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, and retrospective explainability. Let
Science is about how not to be a sucker.
Scholars—scholarship without erudition and natural curiosity can close your mind and lead to the fragmentation of disciplines.
Reality provides such forced revisions of beliefs at quite a high frequency. Many
Randomness in the end is just unknowledge. the world is opaque and appearances fool us
Probability is principally a branch of applied skepticism,