Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.
Wisdom in the young is as unattractive as frivolity in the elderly.
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.
Where simplifications fail, causing the most damage, is when something nonlinear is simplified with the linear as a substitute. That is the most common Procrustean bed.
We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into...
We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness.
We can simplify the relationships between fragility, errors, and antifragility as follows. When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as po...
We are social animals; hell is other people.
We are not naïve enough to believe that someone will be immortal because we have never seen him die, or that someone is innocent of murder because we have never seen him kill. The problem of naïve gen...
We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws. I
War could cause a rise in oil prices, but not scheduled war—since prices adjust to expectations. It has to be in the price, as he said. Indeed, on the news of war, oil collapsed from around $39 a barr...
Until recent history, the central state represented about 5 percent of the economy....and further, governments were sufficiently distracted by war to leave economic affairs to businessmen.The contagio...
Those who use foul language on social networks (such as Twitter) are sending an expensive signal that they are free—and, ironically, competent. You don’t signal competence if you don’t take risks for...
Those who believe in the unconditional benefits of past experience should consider this pearl of wisdom allegedly voiced by a famous ship’s captain: But in all my experience, I have never been in any...
This lack of translation is a mental handicap that comes with being a human; and we will only start to attain wisdom or rationality when we make an effort to overcome and break through it.
This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
Think of the following event: A collection of hieratic persons (from Harvard or some such place) lecture birds on how to fly. Imagine bald males in their sixties, dressed in black robes, officiating i...
Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse). There is absolutely no benefit for someone in such a position to propose something simple...
There were two main sources of technical knowledge and innovation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the hobbyist and the English rector, both of whom were generally in barbell situation...
The story of the wheel also illustrates the point of this chapter: both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their b...