Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute.
Mark Buchanan’s Ubiquity, Philip Ball’s Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail.
Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.1 He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening...
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 say that, in general, failure (and disconfirmation) are more informative than success and confirmation, which is why I claim that negative knowledge is just more robust.
Let me simplify my take on intervention. To me it is mostly about having a systematic protocol to determine when to intervene and when to leave systems alone. And we may need to intervene to control t...
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...
It was a different feeling: it is hard to focus on a conversation, especially when it is mathematical, when you have just personally earned several hundreds of times the annual salary of the researche...
It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it.
It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding stat...
It happens that uncertainty, disorder, and the unknown are completely equivalent in their effect: antifragile systems benefit (to some degree) from, and the fragile is penalized by, almost all of them...
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...
Indeed, our bodies discover probabilities in a very sophisticated manner and assess risks much better than our intellects do. To take one example, risk management professionals look in the past for in...
Indeed we rarely look at religion’s benefits in limiting the intervention bias and its iatrogenics: in a large set of circumstances (marginal disease), anything that takes you away from the doctor and...
In spite of what is studied in business schools concerning economies of scale, size hurts you at times of stress; it is not a good idea to be large during difficult times.
In finance, for instance, people use flimsy theories to manage their risks and put wild ideas under rational scrutiny.
In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subj...
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 a textbook case of naive empiricism, the author also looked for traits these millionaires had in common and figured out that they shared a taste for risk taking. Clearly risk taking is necessary fo...
In a system, the sacrifices of some units—fragile units, that is, or people—are often necessary for the well-being of other units or the whole.