We notice what varies and changes more than what plays a large role but doesn’t change. We
We need tricks to get us there but before that we need to accept the fact that we are mere animals in need of lower forms of tricks, not lectures.
We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We
Using, as an excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
This, perhaps is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one's ego.
They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)...
They agree that chess training only improves chess skills but disagree that classroom training (almost) only improves classroom skills.
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 virtue of capitalism is that society can take advantage of people’s greed rather than their benevolence, but there is no need to, in addition, extol such greed as a moral (or intellectual) accompl...
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.
The policies we need to make decisions on should depend far more on the range of possible outcomes than on the expected final number. I
The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior. Good luck.
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...
Such trait of absence of marriage to ideas is indeed rare among humans. Just as we do with children, we support those in whom we have a heavy investment of food and time until they are able to propaga...
Steve Jobs: People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to...
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.