Had no name for the color blue but managed rather well without it—we stayed for a long part of our history culturally, not biologically, color blind.
Expositor
Equable
Disconfirming instances are far more powerful in establishing truth. Yet
Dignity is worth nothing unless you earn it, unless you are willing to pay a price for it.
Companies trying to misrepresent the product they sell by playing with our cognitive biases, our unconscious associations, and that’s sneaky. The latter is done by, say, showing a poetic picture of a...
Central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.
Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.
You will never fully convince someone that he is wrong; only reality can.
You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.
You cannot do anything with knowledge unless you know where it stops, and the costs of using it.
Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession.
Wittgenstein is occasionally mentioned (you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant).
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes th...
Which brings us to the largest fragilizer of society, and greatest generator of crises, absence of skin in the game. Some become antifragile at the expense of others by getting the upside (or gains) f...
When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place.
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 is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.