People look for books that support their mental program.
Our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according our current knowledge)—and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the know...
One cannot judge a performance in any given field (war, politics, medicine, investments) by the results, but by the costs of the alternative (i.e., if history played out in a different way).
Naïve empiricism—successions of anecdotes selected to fit a story do not constitute evidence. Anyone
Narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. E...
Narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and
Law of iterated expectations, which I outline here in its strong form: if I expect to expect something at some date in the future, then I already expect that something at present.
It is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one.
Is the most antifragile place on the planet; it benefits from shocks that take place in the rest of the world.
Is often a good career move for an author.
Innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity
Had to rely on messenger services. So a local
Good news is good news first; how good matters rather little. So to have a pleasant life you should spread these small affects across time as evenly as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferab...
Formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance.
For decades doctors never suspected that this useless tissue might actually have a use that escaped their detection. The
Examined the cures from cancer that resulted from a visit to Lourdes in France, where people were healed by simple contact with the holy waters, and found out the interesting fact that, of the total c...
Detest the ruthlessness of selection, the inexorable disloyalty of Mother Nature. I detest the notion of improvement thanks to harm to others. As a humanist, I stand against the antifragility of syste...
Considering that alternative outcomes could have taken place, that the world could have been different, is the core of probabilistic thinking.
Common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen. Furthermore, What sounds intelligent in a conversation or a meeting, or, particularly, in the media, is suspicious.
Called the lending rate, the interest rate in the economy (and has proved to be good at it). The libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul was called a crank for suggesting the abolition of the Fede...