We would not even need a statistician; a second-rate engineer would do.
I had time to kill at the airport and it was a great opportunity for me to buy dark European chocolate, especially since I have managed to successfully convince myself that airport calories don’t count. The.
Engineers and tinkerers develop things while history books are written by academics; we will have to refine historical interpretations of growth, innovation, and many such things.
Like tormenting love, some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to get rid of them, turning them into obsessions. Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.
When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place.
This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare.
Some people do not know their own interest – just consider addicts, workaholics, people trapped in a bad relationship, people who support large government, the press, book reviewers, or respectable bureaucrats, all of whom for some mysterious reason act against their own interest.
If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small. If you don’t take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand. Nothing. And when you take risks, insults by half-men, small men, those who don’t risk anything, are similar to barks by non-human animals. You can’t feel insulted by a dog.
Half of life – the interesting half of life – we don’t have a name for.
The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don’t learn rules, just facts, and only facts.
If you can’t put your soul into something, give it up and leave that stuff to someone else.
Self-contradiction is made culturally to be shameful, a matter that can prove disastrous in science.
Have you noticed that while corporations sell you junk drinks, artisans sell you cheese and wine?
Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason.
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
If you engage in a Black Swan–dependent activity, it is better to be part of a group.
There are so many things we can do if we focus on antiknowledge, or what we do not know.
Transportation didn’t get safer just because people learn from errors, but because the system does. The experience of the system is different from that of individuals; it is grounded in filtering.
Let us return to the idea that universities generate wealth and the growth of useful knowledge in society. There is a causal illusion here; time to bust it.
This lack of translation is a mental handicap that comes with being a human; and we will only start to attain wisdom or rationality when we make an effort to overcome and break through it.