But one needs to be careful not to overgeneralize the Drachten effect, as it does not imply the effectiveness of removing all rules from society. As I said earlier, speed on the highway responds to a...
Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules.
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
As to liquid, my rule is drink no liquid that is not at least a thousand years old—so its fitness has been tested. I drink just wine, water, and coffee. No soft drinks. Perhaps the most possibly decei...
Anyone looking for confirmation will find enough of it to deceive himself—and no doubt his peers.*
And we can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the r...
An idea stats to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived! Accordingly,
Almost all those caught making a logical fallacy interpret it as a disagreement.
A very rarely discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities
A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.
A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys with increased statistical confidence.
A saying by the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism. I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local lev...
A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart order to the disorder of human perceptio...
A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion—in
A king, angry at his son, swore that he would crush him with a large stone.
A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says f*** you to fate.
A BS DETECTION HEURISTIC The heuristic here would be to use education in reverse: hire, conditional on an equal set of skills, the person with the least label-oriented education. It means that the per...
. . the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowba...