The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are: the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is g...
The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming.
The divergence is evident in that journos worry considerably more about the opinion of other journalists than the judgment of their readers. Compare this to a healthy system, say, that of restaurants....
The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that one can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems outside philosophy....
The defender of the dogmas of modern finance and efficient markets started a fund that took advantage of market inefficiencies! It is as if the Pope converted to Islam.
The Nation-state: apartheid without political incorrectness.
The Federal Reserve bank protected them at our expense: when conservative bankers make profits, they get the benefits; when they are hurt, we pay the costs.
Someone with a linear payoff needs to be right more than 50 percent of the time. Someone with a convex payoff, much less. The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random an...
So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, fo...
Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us) and empiricism (how things are), we have been blaming the world for not fitt...
Silver Rule in intellectual debates. You can criticize either what a person said or what a person meant. The former is more sensational, hence lends itself more readily to dissemination. The mark of a...
Serious empirical investigation (largely thanks to one Lant Pritchet, then a World Bank economist) shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the level of a country...
Scorn of the abstract: favoring contextualized thinking over more abstract, though more relevant, matters. The death of one child is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.
Reverse-engineering problem: It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than, looking at a puddle, to guess the shape of the ice cube that may have caused it. This inverse proble...
Remember that for an event to be a Black Swan, it does not just have to be rare, or just wild; it has to be unexpected, has to lie outside our tunnel of possibilities. You must be a sucker for it.
Psychologists and economists who study irrationality do not realize that humans may have an instinct to procrastinate only when no life is in danger. I do not procrastinate when I see a lion entering...
Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is...
Pero las ventas de un libro o la magnitud de los sucesos sociales no siguen este tipo de restricciones. Cuesta mucho más de mil días aceptar que un escritor carece de talento, que no se producirá un c...
Pasteur said, like all great discoverers, he knew something about accidental discoveries. The best way to get maximal exposure is to keep researching. Collect opportunities
Our tendency to perceive—to impose—narrativity and causality are symptoms of the same disease—dimension reduction.