In that sense the description coming from journalism is certainly not just an unrealistic representation of the world but rather the one that can fool you the most by grabbing your attention via your...
In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information.
In his book The Nature of Rationality he gets, as is typical with philosophers, into amateur evolutionary arguments and writes the following: Since not more than 50 percent of the individuals can be w...
In addition, there seems to be curious evidence of a link between leadership and a form of psychopathology (the sociopath) that encourages the nonblinking, self-confident, insensitive person to rally...
In a now famous experiment they found that the majority of people, whether predictors or nonpredictors, will judge a deadly flood (causing thousands of deaths) caused by a California earthquake to be...
Imagine going to Mexico with a notebook and trying to figure out the average wealth of the population from talking to people you randomly encounter. Odds are that, without Carlos Slim in your sample,...
If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of (strongly built) typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad'. U...
If both the positive and the negative consequences of an action fell on its author, our learning would be fast. But often an action’s positive consequences benefit only its author, since they are visi...
I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with t...
I will set aside the point that I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealt...
I then completely gave up reading newspapers and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of time (say one hour or more a day, enough time to read more than a hundred additional books...
I suggest this passage from the German philosopher (this passage was detected, translated, and reviled by Karl Popper): Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material par...
I realized that if I were to start writing about the events later they would seem more … historical. There was a difference between the before and the after.
I have two further points to make on this subject. First, justification of overoptimism on grounds that it brought us here arises from a far more serious mistake about human nature: the belief that we...
I engage in a gambling strategy that has 999 chances in 1,000 of making $ 1 (event A) and 1 chance in 1,000 of losing $ 10,000 (event B), as in Table 6.1. My expectation is a loss of close to $ 9 (obt...
I discovered that I had been intuitively using the less-is-more idea as an aid in decision making (contrary to the method of putting a series of pros and cons side by side on a computer screen). For i...
I am never bothered by normal people; it is the bull***tter in the intellectual profession who bothers me. Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a s...
Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost. Patrocles does not strike us as a hero because of his accomplishments (he was rapidly killed) but because he prefer...
Heikot toimivat tarpeidensa mukaan, vahvemmat velvollisuutensa.
He is often involved in a strange ritual, something commonly called a meeting. Now, in addition to these traits, he defaults to thinking that what he doesn’t see is not there, or what he does not unde...