Aut tace aut loquere meliora silencio (only when the words outperform silence). These
Atât demersurile artistice, cât și cele științifice sunt produsul nevoii noastre de a reduce dimensiunile și de a impune lucrurilor o ordine. Gândiți-vă la lumea din jur, încărcată de trilioane de det...
At the end, what matters is the strength of the string—not the wealth and power of the dining party.
At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at th...
Assume that someone tells you that the probability of an event is exactly zero. You ask him where he got this from. Baal told me is the answer. In such case, the person is coherent, but would be deeme...
Aside from the non-narrative view of things, another lesson. People with too much smoke and complicated tricks and methods in their brains start missing elementary, very elementary things. Persons in...
Aside from the decorum of ancient thought as opposed to the coarseness of fresh ink, I have spent some time phrasing the idea in the mathematics of evolutionary arguments and conditional probability....
Aside from France, I was baffled by the puzzle of Sweden and other Nordic states, which are often offered as paragons of the large state that works—the government represents a large portion of the tot...
As an empiricist (actually a skeptical empiricist) I despise the moralizers beyond anything on this planet: I still wonder why they blindly believe in ineffectual methods. Delivering advice assumes th...
As a member of the Christian minority in the Near East, I can vouch that commerce, particularly small commerce, is the door to tolerance—the only door, in my opinion, to any form of tolerance. It beat...
As Yogi Berra said, In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
As I got her to explain to other people her evidence about the lack of effectiveness of funding formal education, one person got frustrated with our skepticism. Wolf’s answer to him was real education...
Anything one needs to market heavily is necessarily either an inferior product or an evil one. And it is highly unethical to portray something in a more favorable light than it actually is.
Another way to view it: the iatrogenics is in the patient, not in the treatment. If the patient is close to death, all speculative treatments should be encouraged—no holds barred. Conversely, if the p...
And when you take risks, insults by half-men (small men, those who don’t risk anything) are similar to barks by nonhuman animals: you can’t feel insulted by a dog.
And the key phrase reverberating in Seneca’s oeuvre is nihil perditi, I lost nothing, after an adverse event. Stoicism
And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.
An essay is an impulsive meditation, not science reporting.
An American ship carrying mustard gas off Bari in Italy was bombed by the Germans 1942. It helped develop chemotherapy owing to the effect of the gas on the condition of the soldiers who had liquid ca...
Amateurs in any discipline are the best, if you can connect with them. Unlike dilettantes, career professionals are to knowledge what prostitutes are to love.