Gravest of all manifestations of silent evidence, the illusion of stability. The
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
For decades doctors never suspected that this useless tissue might actually have a use that escaped their detection. The
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...
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...
Bottom-up political systems, and
Anything locked into planning tends to fail precisely because of these attributes—it is quite a myth that planning helps corporations: in fact we saw that the world is too random and unpredictable to...
[T]he worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a bit deeper.
You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.
You can test a given rule either directly, by looking at instances where it works, or indirectly, by focusing on where it does not work. As we saw earlier, disconfirming instances are far more powerfu...
You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references money in his conversation.
You can imagine how distraught I feel when I hear about the glorified heroism-free middle class values, which, thanks to globalization and the Internet, have spread to any place easily reached by Brit...
You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can w...
Whenever your survival is in play, don’t immediately look for causes and effects.
When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously mo...
What does fitness mean? Being exactly tuned to a given past history of a specific environment, or extrapolating to an environment with stressors of higher intensity? Many seem to point to the first ki...
We have been unconsciously exploiting antifragility in practical life and, consciously, rejecting it—particularly in intellectual life. The
We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results—or those heroes who fo...
We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn.
We do not need to be rational and scientific when it comes to the details of our daily life—only in those that can harm us and threaten our survival. Modern life seems to invite us to do the exact opp...