But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This goal-driven...
But the worse touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This goal-driven...
But the larger point is that we can now see that depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not necessarily a good thing, and can be downright harmful.
Beyond books, consider this simple heuristic: your work and ideas, whether in politics, the arts, or other domains, are antifragile if, instead of having one hundred percent of the people finding your...
Beware of precise plans by governments. As
Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules. Add t...
Before the enlightenment and the age of rationality, there was in the culture a collection of tricks to deal with our fallibility and reversals of fortunes. The elders can still help us with some of t...
Assume that someone tells you that the probability of an event is exactly zero. You ask him where he got this from. Baal told me is the answer. In such case, the person is coherent, but would be deeme...
Aside from the non-narrative view of things, another lesson. People with too much smoke and complicated tricks and methods in their brains start missing elementary, very elementary things. Persons in...
Aside from France, I was baffled by the puzzle of Sweden and other Nordic states, which are often offered as paragons of the large state that works—the government represents a large portion of the tot...
As a member of the Christian minority in the Near East, I can vouch that commerce, particularly small commerce, is the door to tolerance—the only door, in my opinion, to any form of tolerance. It beat...
And, what’s worse, we didn’t get where we are today thanks to policy makers—but thanks to the appetite for risks and errors of a certain class of people we need to encourage, protect, and respect.
And when you take risks, insults by half-men (small men, those who don’t risk anything) are similar to barks by nonhuman animals: you can’t feel insulted by a dog.
And the key phrase reverberating in Seneca’s oeuvre is nihil perditi, I lost nothing, after an adverse event. Stoicism
And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.
And of course you learn from the errors of others. You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.
An American ship carrying mustard gas off Bari in Italy was bombed by the Germans 1942. It helped develop chemotherapy owing to the effect of the gas on the condition of the soldiers who had liquid ca...
Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the normal, particularly with bell curve m...
All I hear is how to live longer, richer, and, of course, more laden with electronic gadgets. We are not the first generation to believe that the worst possible thing to befall us is death. But for th...
Alas, one cannot assert authority by accepting one's own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge-we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages...