You have far more control over your life if you decide on your criterion by yourself.
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.
Luck is far more egalitarian than even intelligence. If people were rewarded strictly according to their abilities, things would still be unfair – people don’t choose their abilities. Randomness has the beneficial effect of reshuffling society’s cards, knocking down the big guy.
Consider that all the wealth of the world can’t buy a liquid more pleasurable than water after intense thirst.
Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort – a disease of civilization: make life longer and longer, while people are more and more sick.
It is the appearance of inconsistency, and not its absence, that makes people attractive.
When she shouts that what you did was unforgivable, she has already started to forgive you.
As a matter of fact, your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call “positive affect,” than on their intensity when they hit. In other words, good news is good news first; how good matters rather little. So to have a pleasant life you should spread these small “affects” across time as evenly as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of great news.
Hatred is much harder to fake than love. You hear of fake love; never of fake hate.
And, what’s worse, we didn’t get where we are today thanks to policy makers – but thanks to the appetite for risks and errors of a certain class of people we need to encourage, protect, and respect.
You can replace lies with truth; but myth is only displaced with a narrative.
The longer one goes without a market trauma, the worse the damage when commotion occurs.
Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules.
So we can learn a lot from data – but not as much as we expect. Sometimes a lot of data can be meaningless; at other times one single piece of information can be very meaningful. It.
A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situations of conflict. Say.
Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.
Society doesn’t evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meetings, academic conferences, tea and cucumber sandwiches, or polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere – and someone with soul in the game. And asymmetry is present in about everything.
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad – at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment.
Almost anything around us of significance is hard to grasp linguistically.
A doctor is pushed by the system to transfer risk from himself to you, and from the present into the future, or from the immediate future into a more distant future.