Noi, membrii varietății umane a primatelor, suntem însetați de reguli, deoarece trebuie să reducem dimensiunile problemelor astfel încât acestea să încapă în capul nostru. Sau, din păcate, așa încât s...
Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and
My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgment, for uttering the I don...
Montaigne also detected the agency problem, or why the last thing a doctor needs is for you to be healthy: No doctor derives pleasure from the health of his friends, wrote the ancient Greek satirist,...
Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state’s monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.
Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.
Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer. So I will expose the transfer of fragility, or rather the theft of antifragility, by people arbitraging the sy...
Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and...
Mathematicians of probability give that a fancy name: ergodicity. It means, roughly, that (under certain conditions) very long sample paths would end up resembling each other. The properties of a very...
Los Cisnes Negros que imaginamos, de los que hablamos y nos preocupamos no se parecen a los que previsiblemente son Cisnes Negros. Como veremos a continuación, nos preocupamos de los sucesos «improbab...
Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expe...
Let us call Mithridatization the result of an exposure to a small dose of a substance that, over time, makes one immune to additional, larger quantities of it. It is the sort of approach used in vacci...
Large corporations and governments do not seem to understand this rebound power of information and its ability to control those who try to control it. When you hear a corporation or a debt-laden gover...
La estrategia de los descubridores y emprendedores es confiar menos en la planificación de arriba abajo y centrarse al máximo en reconocer las oportunidades cuando se presentan, y juguetear con ellas....
Knowledge, even when it is exact, does not often lead to appropriate actions because we tend to forget what we know, or forget how to process it properly if we do not pay attention, even when we are e...
Just as a little bit of fire here and there gets rid of the flammable material in a forest, a little bit of harm here and there in an economy weeds out the vulnerable firms early enough to allow them...
Joseph Stiglitz, with two colleagues, the Orszag brothers (Peter and Jonathan), looked at the very same Fannie Mae. They assessed, in a report, that on the basis of historical experience, the risk to...
It seemed, wrote Machiavelli, that in the midst of murders and civil wars, our republic became stronger [and] its citizens infused with virtues. … A little bit of agitation gives resources to souls an...
It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied—what
It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we don’t know; everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention.