Who gets rewarded, the central banker who avoids a recession or the one who comes to correct his predecessors’ faults and happens to be there during some economic recovery? Who is more valuable, the p...
When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people's opinion, freer, more real.
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 scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion.
We need tricks to get us there but before that we need to accept the fact that we are mere animals in need of lower forms of tricks, not lectures.
We have the illusion that the world functions thanks to programmed design, university research, and bureaucratic funding, but there is compelling—very compelling—evidence to show that this is an illus...
We have far too many ways to interpret past events for our own good.
We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some exte...
We do not realize the full extent of the difference between near and far futures. Yet
We can, however, assess regularities by running precise and thorough experiments on how people react under certain conditions, and keep a tally of what we see.
We can also see from the turkey story the mother of all harmful mistakes: mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence,
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.
Veteran trader Marty O’Connell calls this the firehouse effect. He had observed that firemen with much downtime who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impart...
Unless you are perfectly narcissistic and psychopathic—even then—your worst-case scenario is never limited to the loss of only your life.
Tu esisti pienamente se e solo se la tua conversazione (o i tuoi scritti) non possono essere facilmente ricostruiti con ritagli da altre conversazioni
Try the following experiment. Go to the airport and ask travelers en route to some remote destination how much they would pay for an insurance policy paying, say, a million tugrits (the currency of Mo...
Todo lo que se necesita es una sola (y, por lo que me dicen, fea) ave negra.** Doy un paso adelante, dejando atrás esta cuestión lógico-filosófica, para entrar en la realidad empírica, la cual me obse...
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...