Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.
Some libertarians use the example of Drachten, a town in the Netherlands, in which a dream experiment was conducted. All street signs were removed. The deregulation led to an increase in safety, confi...
So just as Stoicism is the domestication, not the elimination, of emotions, so is the barbell a domestication, not the elimination, of uncertainty.
So from this we can see that there is a tension between nature and individual organisms. Everything alive or organic in nature has a finite life and dies eventually—even Methuselah lived less than a t...
So I stayed in the quant and trading businesses (I’m still there), but organized myself to do minimal but intense (and entertaining) work, focus only on the most technical aspects, never attend busine...
Silver Rule (negative golden rule): Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. Note the difference from the Golden Rule, as the silver one prevents busybodies from attempting to ru...
She received enough attention to get the courtesy of rejection letters and occasional insulting comments instead of the far more insulting and demeaning silence.
Self-contradiction is made culturally to be shameful, a matter that can prove disastrous in science.
Scars signal skin in the game.
Remember the psychological discussions on asymmetries in the perception of skills in the previous chapter? We see flaws in others and not in ourselves. Once again we seem to be wonderful at self-decei...
Recall that someone with only casual knowledge about the problems of randomness would believe that an animal is at the maximum fitness for the conditions of its time. This is not what evolution means;...
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
Primitive societies are largely free of cardiovascular disease, cancer, dental cavities, economic theories, lounge music, and other modern ailments.
Popper’s falsificationism is intimately connected to the notion of an open society. An open society is one in which no permanent truth is held to exist; this would allow counter-ideas to emerge. Karl...
Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong.
Per lo studioso e leader religioso arabo ‘Alī ibn Abī Tālib (che non è un mio parente), mantenere le distanze da una persona ignorante equivale a stare in compagnia di un saggio.
Patients who spend fifteen minutes every day writing an account of their daily troubles feel indeed better about what has befallen them. You
Our operation has a mortality rate of 1%. So far we have operated on ninety-nine patients with great success; you are our one hundreth, hence you have a 100% probability of dying on the table.
Our human race is affected by a chronic underestimation of the possibility of the future straying from the course initially envisioned (in addition to other biases that sometimes exert a compounding e...
Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel—just as fire does.