We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.
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 fasting, took long walks, avoided sugar, bread, white rice, and stock market investments, and refrained from taking economics classes or reading such things as The New York Times.
I write only if I feel like it and only on a subject I feel like writing about – and the reader is no fool.
If the student is smart, the teacher takes the credit.
English “manners” were imposed on the middle class as a way of domesticating them, along with instilling in them the fear of breaking rules and violating social norms.
A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys “with increased statistical confidence.
And, talking about radiation, few wonder why, after hundreds of million of years of having our skins exposed to sun rays, we suddenly need so much protection from them – is it that our exposure is more harmful than before because of changes in the atmosphere, or populations living in an environment mismatching the pigmentation of their skin – or rather, that makers of sun protection products need to make some profits?
We see the obvious and visible consequences, not the invisible and less obvious ones. Yet those unseen consequences... , generally are more meaningful.
Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.
We laugh at others and we don’t realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day.
Black Swans and tail events run the socioeconomic world.
In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information.
You don’t become completely free just by avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.
Another way to view it: the iatrogenics is in the patient, not in the treatment. If the patient is close to death, all speculative treatments should be encouraged – no holds barred. Conversely, if the patient is near healthy, then Mother Nature should be the doctor.
If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.
Finally, I reckon that I am not immune to such an emotional defect. But I deal with it by having no access to information, except in rare circumstances. Again, I prefer to read poetry. If an event is important enough, it will find its way to my ears. I will return to this point in time.
There is something like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the collective when people engage in communal dances, mass riots, or war. Your mood is now that of the herd. You are part of what Elias Canetti calls the rhythmic and throbbing crowd.
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.
Modernity’s double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.
Breaking a fast feels like the exact opposite of a hangover.