Nation-states like war; city-states like commerce; families like stability; and individuals like entertainment,
My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like recognition and credit warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry. I grew to find people gree...
My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism.
Most people fear being without audiovisual stimulation because they are too repetitive when they think and imagine things on their own.
Most of the debate between creationists and evolutionary theorists (of which I do not partake) lies in the following: creationists believe that the world comes from some form of design while evolution...
Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.
Mistaking a naive observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.
Mark Buchanan’s Ubiquity, Philip Ball’s Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail.
Many amateurs believe that plants and animals reproduce on a one-way route toward perfection. Translating the idea in social terms, they believe that companies and organizations are, thanks to competi...
Man-made complex systems tend to develop cascades and runaway chains of reactions that decrease, even eliminate, predictability and cause outsized events.
Lucky fools do not bear the slightest suspicion that they may be lucky fools—by definition, they do not know that they belong to such a category
Let us return to the idea that universities generate wealth and the growth of useful knowledge in society. There is a causal illusion here; time to bust it.
Let us return to pathemata mathemata (learning through pain) and consider its reverse: learning through thrills and pleasure. People have two brains, one when there is skin in the game, one when there...
Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much -- but if you do, do not make big scientif...
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 is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences.
It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it.