I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill.
Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.
Don’t cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.
It’s harder to say no when you really mean it.
Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.
Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.
It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.
For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
We didn’t get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.
Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.
Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.
Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.
Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.
When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
Daily news and sugar confuse our system in the same manner.
You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that’s travelled.
I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.
Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.