It is quite perplexing that those from whom we have benefited the most aren’t those who have tried to help us (say with advice) but rather those who have actively tried—but eventually failed—to harm u...
It is often with the most noble intentions that we do so, as we are pressured to fix things, so we often blow them up with our fear of randomness and love of smoothness.
It is my great hope someday to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect.
It is much easier to sell Look what I did for you than Look what I avoided for you.
It is hard to explain to naive data-driven people that risk is in the future, not in the past.
It is as if we are doomed to be deceived by the most superficial part of things, the packaging, the gift wrapping. This is why we don’t see antifragility in places that are obvious, too obvious. It is...
It hit me right there and then that these antifragile hormetic responses were just a form of redundancy, and all the ideas of Mother Nature converged in my mind. It is all about redundancy. Nature lik...
Indeed, Georges Simenon, one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, only wrote sixty days a year, with three hundred days spent doing nothing. He published more than two hundred novels...
In that sense harboring superstitions is not irrational by any metric: nobody has managed to build a criterion for rationality based on actions that bear no cost. But actions that harm you are detecta...
In order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic (the entrepreneur...
In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observation...
In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly—it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build.
In a thick and captivating book, La rebellion française, the historian Jean Nicolas shows how the culture of rioting was extremely sophisticated—historically, it counts as the true French national spo...
If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.
If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas.
If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life.
If you know all possible conditions of a physical system you can, in theory (though not, as we saw, in practice), project its behavior into the future. But
If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.
If you are looking for your misplaced wallet in your living room, in a trial and error mode, you exercise rationality by not looking in the same place twice. In
If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don’t attend. People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity…or get another job.