In a famous argument, the logician W. V. Quine showed that there exist families of logically consistent interpretations and theories that can match a given series of facts. Such insight should warn us...
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 you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.
If you selected one hundred independent-minded journalists capable of seeing factors in isolation from one another, you would get one hundred different opinions. But the process of having these people...
If you see a fraud and don't say fraud, you are a fraud.
If my brain can tell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot. Such
I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.
I want to be broadly right rather than precisely wrong.
I know that history will be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.
I discovered that it is much more effective to act like a nice guy and be reasonable if you prove willing to go beyond just verbiage. You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in...
I am used to facing, at the end of a conference lecture, the question So what is the difference between robust and antifragile? or the more unenlightened and even more irritating Antifragile is resili...
Hunger (or episodic energy deficit) strengthens the body and the immune system and helps rejuvenate brain cells, weaken cancer cells , and prevent diabetes.
How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble. I mean serious, but not terminal, trouble. I hold—it is beyond speculation, rather a conviction—that innovation and sophistication spark from initial...
How can we logically go from specific instances to reach general conclusions? How do we know what we know? How do we know that what we have observed from given objects and events suffices to enable us...
Hire the successful trader, conditional on a solid track record, whose details you can understand the least.
He provides the example of a philosopher who puzzles about the reality of time, but who nonetheless applies for a research grant to work on the philosophical problem of time during next year’s sabbati...
He is susceptible to conference room boredom and is incapable of talking to businessmen, particularly the run-of-the-mill variety. Nero is allergic to the vocabulary of business talk, not just on plai...
Have you noticed that while corporations sell you junk drinks, artisans sell you cheese and wine?
Harvard is like a Vuitton bag or a Cartier watch. It is a huge drag on the middle-class parents who have been plowing an increased share of their savings into these institutions, transferring their mo...
Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire's spleen, Edgar Allan Poe's moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenc...