You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends severely on the prestige of the school granting it. I remember when I applied to MBA programs being told that anything outside the top ten or t...
Wittgenstein is occasionally mentioned (you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant).
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
What sounds intelligent in a conversation or a meeting, or, particularly, in the media, is suspicious.
What should we control? As a rule, intervening to limit size (of companies, airports, or sources of pollution), concentration, and speed are beneficial in reducing Black Swan risks.
What makes life simple is that the robust and antifragile don’t have to have as accurate a comprehension of the world as the fragile—and
We tend to use knowledge as therapy.
We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It
We said that mere judgment would probably suffice in a primitive society. It is easy for a society to live without mathematics—
We produce thirty-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer—our cumulative prediction errors for political and eco...
We practitioners and quants aren’t too fazed by remarks on the part of academics—it would be like prostitutes listening to technical commentary by nuns.
We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some extent); we are a very unfair one.
We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification! It
We are built to be dupes for theories. But theories come and go; experience stays. Explanations
Verba volent, words fly. Never have people who talk and don’t do been more visible, and played a larger role, than in modern times. This is the product of modernism and division of tasks. Recall that...
Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk.
This, perhaps is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one's ego.
This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.
This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can’t know) is the central idea of uncertainty. Much