Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it—books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.
Croesus, King of Lydia, was considered the richest man of his time. To this day Romance languages use the expression rich as Croesus to describe a person of excessive wealth. He was said to be visited...
Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works—we even seem to have evidence...
Corollary to Moore’s Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.*
Contra the prevailing belief, success isn't being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies.
Consider that all the wealth of the world can’t buy a liquid more pleasurable than water after intense thirst.
Complex systems are full of interdependencies—hard to detect—and nonlinear responses.
Clearly you cannot manufacture more information than the past can deliver; if you buy one hundred copies of The New York Times, I am not too certain that it would help you gain incremental knowledge o...
Characteristically, Samuelson intimidated those who questioned his techniques with the statement Those who can, do science, others do methodology. If you knew math, you could do science. This is remin...
By the mechanism of retrospective determinism we will find the cause—actually,
But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This goal-driven...
But the worse touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This goal-driven...
But the technology is only trivial retrospectively—not prospectively.
But the larger point is that we can now see that depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not necessarily a good thing, and can be downright harmful.
But I also buy the opposite argument that regulating street signs does not seem to reduce risks; drivers become more placid. Experiments show that alertness is weakened when one relinquishes control t...
Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know.
Beware of precise plans by governments. As
Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its
Basically this category would include those who think that the cure for obesity is to inform people that they should be healthy.
Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.