Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.
Journalists are currently in the most insecure profession you can find: the majority live hand to mouth, and ostracism by their friends would be terminal. Thus they become easily prone to manipulation...
It turns out, as shown by Karsenty and others who have since embarked on the line of research, that the reverse is also largely true: loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones al...
It turned out that the ancients—again, those ancients!—were aware of it: the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this...
It took us a while to discover that we do effectively think, but that we more readily narrate backward in order to give ourselves the illusion of understanding, and give a cover to our past actions.
It is just that narrative can be lethal when used in the wrong places.
It is always convenient to invoke universalism when you are in the majority.
It is a fallacy that suicide bombers are driven by the promise of a reward of some Islamic paradise with virgins and other entertainment, for, as the anthropologist Scott Atran has pointed out, the fi...
It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one's limitations--Scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are sp...
Indeed, people tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of national identity, which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors, was shown to be a total fiction. (National trait...
In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical facts.
In fact, the most interesting aspect of evolution is that it only works because of its antifragility; it is in love with stressors, randomness, uncertainty, and disorder—while individual organisms are...
In an antique city-state, or a modern municipality, shame is the penalty for the violation of ethics—making things more symmetric. Banishment and exile, or, worse, ostracism were severe penalties—peop...
In a few decades will we look upon the Nobel economics committee with the same smirk as when we look at the respected scientific establishments of the Middle Ages that promoted (against all observatio...
In 1960 Taiwan had a much lower literacy rate than the Philippines and half the income per person; today Taiwan has ten times the income. At
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 want to study classical values such as courage or learn about stoicism, don’t necessarily look for classicists. One is never a career academic without a reason. Read the texts themselves: Senec...
If you want to become antifragile, put yourself in the situation loves mistakes—to the right of hates mistakes—by making these numerous and small in harm. We will call this process and approach the ba...
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.
Ideas come and go, stories stay.