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
What do the popular expressions a swimmer’s body and beginner’s luck have in common? What do they seem to share with the concept of history? There is a belief among gamblers that beginners are almost...
We would not even need a statistician; a second-rate engineer would do.
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 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 have far too many ways to interpret past events for our own good.
We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification! It
We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.
We are fragilizing social and economic systems by denying them stressors and randomness, putting them in the Procrustean bed of cushy and comfortable—but ultimately harmful—modernity.
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...
To view it in another way, consider the difference between judging on process and judging on results. Lower-ranking persons in the enterprise are judged on both process and results—in fact, owing to t...
To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with killer apps, these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the hist...
Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk.
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