We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.
Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best.
To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.
There is, in the Black Swan zone, a limit to knowledge that can never be reached, no matter how sophisticated statistical and risk management science ever gets.
There are designations, like economist, prostitute, or consultant, for which additional characterization doesn’t add information.
The theory is the child of the cure, not the opposite—ex cura theoria nascitur.
The IYI subscribes to The New Yorker, a journal designed so philistines can learn to fake a conversation about evolution, neurosomething, cognitive biases, and quantum mechanics.
Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you strong evidence of submission.
So, suspecting that Nero had a contract on her, she got herself Mithridatized against the poisons that would have been available to her son’s underlings. Like Mithridates, Agrippina eventually died by...
Seneca’s version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside.
Scranton showed that we have been building and using jet engines in a completely trial-and-error experiential manner, without anyone truly understanding the theory. Builders
Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a...
People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.
Life is long gamma.
It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.
For a theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
Engineers can compute but not define, mathematicians can define but not compute, economists can neither define nor compute.
Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.
Convincing - and confident - disciplines, say, physics, tend to use little statistical backup, while political science and economics, which have never produced anything of note, are full of elaborate...
Consider the iatrogenics of newspapers. They need to fill their pages every day with a set of news items—particularly those news items also dealt with by other newspapers. But to do things right, they...