Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system. Indeed, confusing people a little bit is beneficial—it is good for you and good for them. For an application of the point in daily life, imagine someone...
In the old days, privilege came with obligations—except for the small class of intellectuals who served a patron or, in some cases, the state. You want to be a feudal lord—you will be first to die. Yo...
In the complex world, the notion of cause itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined—another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes fo...
In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
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...
If you want to understand how vapid are the current modernistic arguments (and understand your existential priorities), consider the difference between lions in the wild and those in captivity. Lions...
If you want to accelerate someone’s death, give him a personal doctor. I don’t mean provide him with a bad doctor: just pay for him to choose his own. Any doctor will do. This may be the only possible...
If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is...
If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own....
If the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit.
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 wanted to become a flaneur, a professional meditator, sit in cafes, lounge, unglued to desks and organization structures, sleep as long as I needed, read voraciously, and not owe any explanation to...
I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent...
I mentioned earlier that to understand successes and analyze what caused them, we need to study the traits present in failures.
I have called this mental defect the Lucretius problem, after the Latin poetic philosopher who wrote that the fool believes that the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest one he h...
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 don’t particularly care about the usual. If you want to get an idea of a friend’s temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not und...
I did not feel ill, Symmache; now I do (after your ministrations). (Non habui febrem, Symmache, nunc habeo).
I believe that forcing researchers to eat their own cooking whenever possible solves a serious problem in science.