It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied—what physicists call percolation theory, in which the properties of the randomness of the terrain are studied, rather than those of...
It is the same kind of deep internal disgust that takes hold of me when I see a rich eighty-two-year-old man surrounded with babes, twentysomething mistresses (often Russian or Ukrainian). I am not he...
It is often said that is wise he who can see things coming. Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.
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...
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 fact, the reason I felt immediately at home in America is precisely because American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stig...
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 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 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 want to become antifragile, put yourself in the situation loves mistakes—to the right of hates mistakes—by making these numerous and small in harm. We will call this process and approach the ba...
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 The Black Swan is about epistemic limitations, then, from this definition, we can see that it is not about some objectively defined phenomenon, like rain or a car crash—it is simply something that...
I wonder why people don’t realize the simple truism, that is, the fooled by randomness effect: mistaking the merely associative for the causal, that is, if rich countries are educated, immediately inf...
I mentioned earlier that to understand successes and analyze what caused them, we need to study the traits present in failures.
I had a strong bias in favor of Russian scientists; many can be put to active use as chess coaches (I also got a piano teacher out of the process). In addition, they are extremely helpful in the inter...
I did not feel ill, Symmache; now I do (after your ministrations). (Non habui febrem, Symmache, nunc habeo).