To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with killer apps, these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the hist...
To summarize: in this (personal) essay, I stick my neck out and make a claim, against many of our habits of thought, that our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (i...
To be genuinely empirical is to reflect reality as faithfully as possible; to be honorable implies not fearing the appearance and consequences of being outlandish.
Those who talk about books as commodities are inauthentic, just as those who collect acquaintances can be superficial in their friendships. A novel you like resembles a friend. You read it and reread...
This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. Peopl...
This does not mean we cannot talk about causes; there are ways to escape the narrative fallacy. How? By making conjectures and running experiments, or as we shall see in Part Two (alas) by making test...
This confirmation problem pervades our modern life, since most conflicts have at their root the following mental bias: when Arabs and Israelis watch news reports they see different stories in the same...
Thirty-nine percent of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 percent of the income distribution, 56 percent will find themselves in the top 10 percent, and 73 percent will spend a year in the top 2...
There is more money in designing a shoe than in actually making it: Nike, Dell, and Boeing can get paid for just thinking, organizing, and leveraging their know-how and ideas while subcontracted facto...
There are so many things we can do if we focus on antiknowledge, or what we do not know.
The true hero in the Black Swan world is someone who prevents a calamity and, naturally, because the calamity did not take place, does not get recognition—or a bonus—for it. I will be taking the conce...
The scientific association with a big idea, the brand name, goes to the one who connects the dots, not the one who makes a casual observation—even Charles Darwin, who uncultured scientists claim inven...
The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.
The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know.
The problem is that we humans are prone to the availability heuristic, by which the salient is mistaken for the statistical, and the conspicuous and emotional effect of an event makes us think it is o...
The model was right, it worked well, but the game turned out to be a different one than anticipated.
The left holds that because markets are stupid models should be smart; the right believes that because models are stupid markets should be smart. Alas, it never hit both sides that both markets and mo...
The important difference between theory and practice lies precisely in the detection of the sequence of events and retaining the sequence in memory. If life is lived forward but remembered backward, a...
The fact that people in countries with cold weather tend to be harder working, richer, less relaxed, less amicable, less tolerant of idleness, more (over) organized and more harried than those in hott...
The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.