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 does not mean that one’s personal experiences constitute a sufficient sample to derive a conclusion about an idea; it is just that one’s personal experience gives the stamp of authenticity and sinc...
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 any type of activity or business divorced from the direct filter of skin in the game, the great majority of people know the jargon, play the part, and are intimate with the cosmetic details, but ar...
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...
If you want to accelerate someone’s death, give him a personal doctor. I don’t mean provide him with a bad doctor: just pay for him to choose his own. Any doctor will do. This may be the only possible...
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. And when you ta...
If my brain can tell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot. Such
I write only if I feel like it and only on a subject I feel like writing about—and the reader is no fool.
I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.
I use the example as computed by the mathematician Michael Berry. If you know a set of basic parameters concerning the ball at rest, can compute the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can...
I know that history will be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.
I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don’t know what that event will be.
I developed the governing impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, an...
I am convinced that there exists a tradable security in the Western world that would be 100% correlated with the changes in temperature in Ulan Bator,
Humans somehow fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them.
How? Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing w...
How was your year? brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside.