Nero believes that risk-conscious hard work and discipline can lead someone to achieve a comfortable life with a very high probability. Beyond that, it is all randomness: either by taking enormous (an...
Mother Nature is not perfect, but has so far proven smarter than humans, certainly much smarter than biologists. So my approach is to combine evidence-based research (stripped of biological theory), w...
Mother Nature did not attend high school geometry courses or read the books of Euclid of Alexandria. Her geometry is jagged, but with a logic of its own and one that is easy to understand.
Modernity’s double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.
Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.
Men destroy each other during war, themselves during peacetime.
Mathematics is not just a numbers game, it is a way of thinking.
Locke’s definition of a madman: someone reasoning correctly from erroneous premises.
Lo que no sabemos La lógica del Cisne Negro hace que lo que no sabemos sea más importante que lo que sabemos.* Tengamos en cuenta que muchos Cisnes Negros pueden estar causados y exacerbados por el he...
Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others.
Like tormenting love, some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to get rid of them, turning them into obsessions. Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought contr...
Let me warn against misinterpreting the message here. The argument is not against the notion of intervention; in fact I showed above that I am equally worried about underintervention when it is truly...
L'odio è amore con un piccolo errore da qualche parte nella programmazione: un errore che si potrebbe correggere, ma che è molto difficile trovare
It seems that it is the most unsuccessful people who give the most advice, particularly for writing and financial matters.
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 no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.
It is hard to resist discussion of artificial history without a comment on the father of all pseudothinkers, Hegel. Hegel writes a jargon that is meaningless outside of a chic Left Bank Parisian café...
It is also related to a problem called denigration of history, as gamblers, investors, and decision-makers feel that the sorts of things that happen to others would not necessarily happen to them.