If there is something in nature you don’t understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding.
If the past, by bringing surprises, did not resemble the past previous to it (what I call the past's past), then why should our future resemble our current past?
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...
Randomness, in practice, is what we don’t know; to invoke randomness is to plead ignorance).
Why do we keep focusing on the minutiae, not the possible significant large events, in spite of the obvious evidence of their huge influence?
Later—unlike gardeners, who understand rather well that pruning trees strengthens them. Likewise peace—some kind of forced, constrained, non-natural peace—may be costly in lives: just
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.
More data means more information, but it also means more false information.
Luck favors the prepared, Pasteur
Life is long gamma.
It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.
If you hear a prominent economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.
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...
We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.
Be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so.
You are a lucky man; you presented in such a comprehensive way the effect of chance on society and the overestimation of cause and effect. You show how stupid we are to systematically try to explain s...