The Swiss doctor Claparède had an amnesic patient completely crippled with her ailment. Her condition was so bad that he would have to reintroduce himself to her at a frequency of once per fifteen min...
That there is no evidence of the possibility of large events, i.e., Black Swans. You are likely to confuse that statement, however, particularly if you do not pay close attention, with the statement t...
Teleological
Taking the half-invented into the invented is often the real breakthrough
System that overcompensates is necessarily in overshooting mode,
Sobs (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks hüzün (from the Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy—...
Positive Black Swans have a necessary first step: you need to be exposed to them. Many people do not realize that they are getting a lucky break in life when they get it. If
People overreact to low-probability outcomes when you discuss the event with them, when you make them aware of it. If
People often confuse complex ideas that cannot be simplified into a media-friendly statement as symptomatic of a confused mind.
People look for books that support their mental program.
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
Narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and
My characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and...
Mi heurística me sugiere que cuanto más pagano sea alguien, más brillante es su mente, y mayor capacidad tiene para gestionar matices y ambigüedades.
Making some types of errors is the most rational thing to do, when the errors are of little cost, as they lead to discoveries. For instance, most medical discoveriesare accidental to something else. A...
La acción del Cisne Negro se sitúa en Extremistán, no es más que una mera aproximación; les ruego que no la platonifiquen, no la simplifiquemos más de lo que sea necesario.
It so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers. It is also far more tolerant of bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and erro...
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.