The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.
The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.
The brilliant British mathematician, eccentric, and computer pioneer Alan Turing came up with the following test: A computer can be said to be intelligent if it can (on average) fool a human into mist...
The beast in this book is not just the bell curve and the self-deceiving statistician, nor the Platonified scholar who needs theories to fool himself with. It is the drive to focus on what makes sense...
The Pyrrhonian skeptics were docile citizens who followed customs and traditions whenever possible, but taught themselves to systematically doubt everything, and thus attain a level of serenity. But w...
Technology can degrade (and endanger) every aspect of a sucker’s life while convincing him that it is becoming more efficient. - The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully...
Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.
Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.
Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.
So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, fo...
Recall the confirmation fallacy: governments are great at telling you what they did, but not what they did not do. In fact, they engage in what could be labeled as phony philanthropy, the activity of...
Puede que no sea algo exigible desde el punto de vista ético, pero la política más eficaz y más libre de vergüenza es la transparencia máxima, la cual incluye la transparencia de intenciones.
Pero las ventas de un libro o la magnitud de los sucesos sociales no siguen este tipo de restricciones. Cuesta mucho más de mil días aceptar que un escritor carece de talento, que no se producirá un c...
People confuse science and scientists. Science is great, but individual scientists are dangerous. They are human; they are marred by the biases humans have. Perhaps even more. For most scientists are...
Our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the ide...
One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bir...
On the one hand, I try to define myself and behave officially as a no-nonsense hyperrealist ferreting out the role of chance; on the other, I have no qualms indulging in all manner of personal superst...
On alternative histories, a probabilistic view of the world, intellectual fraud, and the randomness wisdom of a Frenchman with steady bathing habits. How journalists are bred to not understand random...
Of course, it is not so easy to falsify, i.e., to state that something is wrong with full certainty. Imperfections in your testing method may yield a mistaken no. The doctor discovering cancer cells m...
Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not.