It struck me, a belief that has never left me since, that we are just a great machine for looking backward, and that humans are great at self-delusion.
It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life— with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of ch...
Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it. For instance, many wreck their reputations merely by trying to defend them.
Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.
In their intense meditation the hidden sound of things approaching reaches them and they listen reverently while in the street outside the people hear nothing at all.
In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information.
In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly—it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build. (During
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...
If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.
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...
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 noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as m...
I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.
I had a vivid illustration of domain dependence in the driveway of a hotel in the pseudocity of Dubai. A fellow who looked like a banker had a uniformed porter carry his luggage (I can instantly tell...
I don’t mean just you, your cousin Joey, and me, but almost all social scientists who, for over a century, have operated under the false belief that their tools could measure uncertainty
Half the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears.
Economics is not a science and should not be there to advise policy.
Dacă faci o proiecție pe baza trecutului în mod liniar, continui o tendință. Dar posibilele devieri viitoare de la cursul trecutului sunt infinite.
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...