A half-man (or, rather, half-person) is not someone who does not have an opinion, just someone who does not take risks for it.
A donkey equally famished and thirsty caught at an equal distance between food and water would unavoidably die of hunger or thirst. But he can be saved thanks to a random nudge one way or the other. T...
A) The more nonlinear, the more the function of something divorces itself from the something. If traffic were linear, then there would be no difference in traffic time between the two following situat...
The error in reasoning is a bit from wishful thinking, because education is considered good; I wonder why people don’t make the epiphenomenal association between the wealth of a country and something...
Second fallacy lies in failing to take into account forecast degradation as the projected period lengthens. We
Our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according our current knowledge)—and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the know...
Narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. E...
Law of iterated expectations, which I outline here in its strong form: if I expect to expect something at some date in the future, then I already expect that something at present.
Innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity
Detest the ruthlessness of selection, the inexorable disloyalty of Mother Nature. I detest the notion of improvement thanks to harm to others. As a humanist, I stand against the antifragility of syste...
Considering that alternative outcomes could have taken place, that the world could have been different, is the core of probabilistic thinking.
Both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the...
Yet in spite of the visibility of the counterevidence, and the wisdom you can pick up free of charge from the ancients (or grandmothers), moderns try today to create inventions from situations of comf...
What they call play (gym, travel, sports) looks like work; the harder they try, the more captive they are.
We have polluted for years, causing much damage to the environment, while the scientists currently making these complicated forecasting models were not sticking their necks out and trying to stop us f...
We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule tha...
We can discuss this point from different angles. Experts call one manifestation of such denigration of history historical determinism. In a nutshell we think that we would know when history is made; w...
Those who think religion is about belief don’t understand religion, and don’t understand belief.
This nationality business helps you make a great story and satisfies your hunger for ascription of causes. It seems to be the dump site where all explanations go until one can ferret out a more obviou...
They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status—but rarely for your wisdom.