Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.
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...
More than two thousand years ago, the Roman orator, belletrist, thinker, Stoic, manipulator-politician, and (usually) virtuous gentleman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, presented the following story. One Diag...
More generally, we underestimate the share of randomness in about everything, a point that may not merit a book—except when it is the specialist who is the fool of all fools. Disturbingly, science has...
Monte Carlo (the old name for a roulette wheel)
Montaigne was neither one of the academics of the Sorbonne nor a professional man of letters, and he was not these things on two planes. First, he was a doer; he had been a magistrate, a businessman,...
Monsieur de Norpois is made to be ashamed of the fact that he expressed a different opinion. Proust did not consider that the diplomat might have changed his mind. We
Missing a train is only painful if you run after it!
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....
It takes considerable effort to see facts (and remember them) while withholding judgment and resisting explanations. And
It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones, and win against better rivals. Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrad...
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.
In short, the fragilista (medical, economic, social planning) is one who makes you engage in policies and actions, all artificial, in which the benefits are small and visible, and the side effects pot...
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
Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop...
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 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 found out that telling researchers This is where your methods work very well is vastly better than telling them This is what you guys don't know. So when I presented to what was until then the most...