I believe that the principal asset I need to protect and cultivate is my deep-seated intellectual insecurity.
I believe that forcing researchers to eat their own cooking whenever possible solves a serious problem in science.
I am used to facing, at the end of a conference lecture, the question So what is the difference between robust and antifragile? or the more unenlightened and even more irritating Antifragile is resili...
I am never bothered by normal people; it is the bull***tter in the intellectual profession who bothers me. Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a s...
I am also realizing the nonlinear effect behind success in anything: It is better to have a handful of enthusiastic advocates than hordes of people who appreciate your work—better to be loved by a doz...
His idea is that if we were to optimize at every step in life, then it would cost us an infinite amount of time and energy. Accordingly,
Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost. Patrocles does not strike us as a hero because of his accomplishments (he was rapidly killed) but because he prefer...
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.
He dicho que el Cisne Negro tiene tres atributos: la impredecibilidad, las consecuencias y la explicabilidad retrospectiva. Examinemos eso de la impredecibilidad.*
He defaults to thinking that what he doesn't see is not there, or what he does not understand does not exist. At the core, he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.
Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stre...
Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will su...
For more than a millennium the eastern Mediterranean seaboard called Syria Libanensis, or Mount Lebanon, had been able to accommodate at least a dozen different sects, ethnicities, and beliefs—it work...
For instance, few realize that we are changing the brains of schoolchildren through medication in order to make them adjust to the curriculum, rather than the reverse.
First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the b...
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not...
FAT TONY: My dear Socrates … you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally righ...
Ex cura theoria nascitur.
Every time you use a coffeemaker for your morning cappuccino, you are benefiting from the fragility of the coffeemaking entrepreneur who failed. He failed in order to help put the superior merchandise...