Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many p...
Tu esisti pienamente se e solo se la tua conversazione (o i tuoi scritti) non possono essere facilmente ricostruiti con ritagli da altre conversazioni
True, the Web produces acute concentration. A large number of users visit just a few sites, such as Google, which, at the time of this writing, has total market dominance. At no time in history has a...
Transportation didn’t get safer just because people learn from errors, but because the system does. The experience of the system is different from that of individuals; it is grounded in filtering.
To see how transfer of antifragility works, consider two scenarios, in which the market does the same thing on average but following different paths. Path 1: market goes up 50 percent, then goes back...
To Fail Seven Times, Plus or Minus Two Let me stop to issue rules based on the chapter so far. (i) Look for optionality; in fact, rank things according to optionality, (ii) preferably with open-ended,...
This is one of the many reasons that journalism may be the greatest plague we face today—as the world becomes more and more complicated and our minds are trained for more and more simplification.
This high-yield market resembles a nap on a railway track.
This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and...
Things are always obvious after the fact. The civil servant was a very intelligent person, and this mistake is much more prevalent than one would think. It has to do with the way our mind handles hist...
There is something nonphilosophical about investing one’s pride and ego into a my house/ library/ car is bigger than that of others in my category—it is downright foolish to claim to be first in one’s...
There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
The worst problem of modernity lies in the malignant transfer of fragility and antifragility from one party to the other, with one getting the benefits, the other (unwittingly) getting the harm, with...
The person you are the most afraid to contradict is yourself.
The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components.
The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something s...
The future ain’t what it used to be, Berra
The fragility of every startup is necessary for the economy to be antifragile, and that’s what makes, among other things, entrepreneurship work: the fragility of individual entrepreneurs and their nec...
The engineer and historian of engineering Henry Petroski presents a very elegant point. Had the Titanic not had that famous accident, as fatal as it was, we would have kept building larger and larger...