Monsieur de Norpois is made to be ashamed of the fact that he expressed a different opinion. Proust did not consider that the diplomat might have changed his mind. We
Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer. So I will expose the transfer of fragility, or rather the theft of antifragility, by people arbitraging the sy...
Missing a train is only painful if you run after it!
Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
Metric-lowering drugs are particularly vicious because of a legal complexity. The doctor has the incentive to prescribe it because should the patient have a heart attack, he would be sued for negligen...
Mathematicians of probability give that a fancy name: ergodicity. It means, roughly, that (under certain conditions) very long sample paths would end up resembling each other. The properties of a very...
Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expe...
Let us call Mithridatization the result of an exposure to a small dose of a substance that, over time, makes one immune to additional, larger quantities of it. It is the sort of approach used in vacci...
Large corporations and governments do not seem to understand this rebound power of information and its ability to control those who try to control it. When you hear a corporation or a debt-laden gover...
La mente humana padece tres trastornos cuando entra en contacto con la historia, lo que yo llamo el terceto de la opacidad. Son los siguientes: a) la ilusión de comprender, o cómo todos pensamos que s...
La forma de evitar los males de la falacia narrativa es favorecer la experimentación sobre la narración, la experiencia sobre la historia y el conocimiento clínico sobre las teorías. Es evidente que u...
It would be preferable if we were better at understanding cancer or the (highly nonlinear) weather than the origin of the universe. How
It was confidently believed that the scientific successes of the industrial revolution could be carried through into the social sciences, particularly with such movements as Marxism. Pseudoscience cam...
It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied—what
It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we don’t know; everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention.
It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals. Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrad...
It is quite perplexing that those from whom we have benefited the most aren’t those who have tried to help us (say with advice) but rather those who have actively tried—but eventually failed—to harm u...
It is often with the most noble intentions that we do so, as we are pressured to fix things, so we often blow them up with our fear of randomness and love of smoothness.
It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.
It is my great hope someday to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect.