He dicho que el Cisne Negro tiene tres atributos: la impredecibilidad, las consecuencias y la explicabilidad retrospectiva. Examinemos eso de la impredecibilidad.*
Give me a few lines written by any man and I will find enough to get him hung goes the saying attributed to Richelieu, Voltaire, Talleyrand (a vicious censor during the French revolution phase of terr...
George Santayana: A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will su...
Fragility can be measured; risk is not measurable (outside of casinos or the minds of people who call themselves risk experts). This provides a solution to what I’ve called the Black Swan problem—the...
For studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you c...
For instance, it has been argued since the 1970s that limiting speed on the highway (and enforcing it) leads to an extremely effective increase in safety. This can be plausible because risks of accide...
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not...
Every time you use a coffeemaker for your morning cappuccino, you are benefiting from the fragility of the coffeemaking entrepreneur who failed. He failed in order to help put the superior merchandise...
Even political systems follow a form of rational tinkering, when people are rational hence take the better option: the Romans got their political system by tinkering, not by reason. Polybius in his Hi...
Este mult mai dificil să pierzi într-un joc pe care l-ai pus la punct tu însuți.
English manners were imposed on the middle class as a way of domesticating them, along with instilling in them the fear of breaking rules and violating social norms.
Elsa Triolet (time burns but leaves no ashes).
Economics Schmeconomics. It is all market dynamics
Don’t talk about progress in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.
Cygnus Atratus In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount...
Criticism, for a book, is a truthful, unfaked badge of attention, signaling that it is not boring; and boring is the only very bad thing for a book. Consider
Consider the tourist brochures used by countries to advertise their wares: you can expect that the pictures presented to you will look much, much better than anything you will encounter in the place....
Chiedere alla scienza di spiegare la vita, e questioni vitali, è come chiedere a un grammatico di spiegare la poesia
Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their cate...