Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War. Even.
The Federal Reserve bank protected them at our expense: when “conservative” bankers make profits, they get the benefits; when they are hurt, we pay the costs.
In that sense the description coming from journalism is certainly not just an unrealistic representation of the world but rather the one that can fool you the most by grabbing your attention via your emotional apparatus – the cheapest to deliver sensation. Take.
I’ve looked in history for heroes who became heroes for what they did not do, but it is hard to observe nonaction; I could not easily find any.
Mathematicians think in symbols, physicists in objects, philosophers in concepts, geometers in images, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators, writers in impressions, and idiots in words.
The divergence is evident in that journos worry considerably more about the opinion of other journalists than the judgment of their readers. Compare this to a healthy system, say, that of restaurants. As we saw in Chapter 8, restaurant owners worry about the opinion of their customers, not those of other restaurant owners, which keeps them in check and prevents the business from straying collectively away from its interests.
Mark Buchanan’s Ubiquity, Philip Ball’s Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail.
A squeeze occurs when people have no choice but to do something, and do it right away, regardless of the costs.
We need tricks to get us there but before that we need to accept the fact that we are mere animals in need of lower forms of tricks, not lectures.
We are fragilizing social and economic systems by denying them stressors and randomness, putting them in the Procrustean bed of cushy and comfortable – but ultimately harmful – modernity.
Our tendency to perceive – to impose – narrativity and causality are symptoms of the same disease – dimension reduction.
Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized.
The only condition for such brand of more sophisticated rationalism: to believe and act as if one does not have the full story – to be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so.
It was calculated that actors who win an Oscar tend to live on average about five years longer than their peers who don’t.
The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming.
This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was – or is.
Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters – those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives.
It is often with the most noble intentions that we do so, as we are pressured to “fix” things, so we often blow them up with our fear of randomness and love of smoothness.
One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of.
A word on the display of emotions. Almost no one can conceal his emotions. Behavioral scientists believe that one of the main reasons why people become leaders is not from what skills they seem to possess, but rather from what extremely superficial impression they make on others through hardly perceptible physical signals – what we call today “charisma,” for example. The biology of the phenomenon is now well studied under the subject heading “social emotions.