Mi heurística me sugiere que cuanto más pagano sea alguien, más brillante es su mente, y mayor capacidad tiene para gestionar matices y ambigüedades.
Members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer sim...
Making some types of errors is the most rational thing to do, when the errors are of little cost, as they lead to discoveries. For instance, most medical discoveriesare accidental to something else. A...
Loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones also causes aging, diabetes, and, for males, loss of fertility and sexual function. We just cannot isolate any causal relationship in a...
La acción del Cisne Negro se sitúa en Extremistán, no es más que una mera aproximación; les ruego que no la platonifiquen, no la simplifiquemos más de lo que sea necesario.
It took me a lifetime to figure out the second point: implementation does not necessarily proceed from invention. It, too, requires luck and circumstances.
It so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers. It is also far more tolerant of bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and erro...
Is much easier to understand if something is harmed by volatility—hence fragile—than try to forecast harmful events, such as these oversized Black Swans. But only practitioners (or people who do thing...
Incertitude.
In Ovid, difficulty is what wakes up the genius (ingenium mala saepe movent),
In Arabic it is called Shhm—best translated as nonsmall. 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...
Illusion of local causal chains—that is, confusing catalysts for causes and assuming that one can know which catalyst will produce which effect.
Gravest of all manifestations of silent evidence, the illusion of stability. The
From the reference point of the winner (and, who does not, and this is key, take the losers into account), a long string of wins will appear to be too extraordinary an occurrence to be explained by lu...
From increasing the number of people in the tails, that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own, those endowed with
Experiments have shown that players rely on several heuristics. The gaze heuristic is the simplest one and works if the ball is already high up in the air: Fix your gaze on the ball, start running, an...
Don’t understand? is, simply, work on the undesirable states of f(x). It is often easier to modify f(x) than to get better knowledge of x. (In other words, robustification rather than forecasting Blac...
Do not use this argument to avoid trying to learn from history. All I am saying is that it is not so simple; be suspicious of the because and handle it with care—particularly in situations where you s...
Complex systems do not have obvious one-dimensional cause-and-effect mechanisms, and that under opacity, you do not mess with such a system.
Cocksure prophet. Where I beg to differ with the great