Recall that epic heroes were judged by their actions, not by the results. No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word. We are le...
Questo stimolo all’acquisto di cose nuove che sono destinate a perdere le loro caratteristiche di novità, soprattutto se paragonate a quelle ancora più nuove, viene definito effetto tapis roulant (tre...
Pure generosity is when you help the ingrate. Every other form is self-serving.
Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.
People don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did.
Or take the health category. Adding is on the left, removing to the right. Removing medication, or some other unnatural stressor—say, gluten, fructose, tranquilizers, nail polish, or some such substan...
One Thousand And One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker
On a folded piece of paper, in turn, each one of them would write a predetermined part of a sentence, not knowing the others’ choice. The first would pick an adjective, the second a noun, the third a...
Nature likes to overinsure itself. Layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of natural systems. We humans have two kidneys (this may even include accountants), extra spare parts,...
My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privil...
My being here is a consequential low-probability occurrence, and I tend to forget it.
Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort—a disease of civilization: make life longer and longer, while people are more and more sick.
Mother Nature has given us some defense mechanisms: as in Aesop’s fable, one of these is our ability to consider that the grapes we cannot (or did not) reach are sour. But an aggressively stoic prior...
Mother Nature does not develop Alzheimer’s—actually there is evidence that even humans would not easily lose brain function with age if they followed a regimen of stochastic exercise and stochastic fa...
Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.
Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere....
Linear relationships are truly the exception; we only focus on them in classrooms and textbooks because they are easier to understand. Yesterday
La mejor forma de demostrar el carácter arbitrario de estas categorías, y el efecto de contagio que producen, es recordar con qué frecuencia esos grupos cambian por completo a lo largo de la historia....
Just as a little bit of fire here and there gets rid of the flammable material in a forest, a little bit of harm here and there in an economy weeds out the vulnerable firms early enough to allow them...
It takes considerable effort to see facts (and remember them) while withholding judgment and resisting explanations. And