Antifragile

Hormesis, a word coined by pharmacologists, is when a small dose of a harmful substance is actually beneficial for the organism, acting as medicine. (Location 816)

moderns try today to create inventions from situations of comfort, safety, and predictability instead of accepting the notion that “necessity (Location 897)

If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one. Your body is more imaginative about the future (Location 968)

(I’ve had a hard time conveying to intellectuals the intellectual superiority of practice.) (Location 2070)

Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state’s monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility. (Location 2078)

There is a Latin expression festina lente, “make haste slowly.” (Location 2290)

in the rare situations when he is angry, unlike with the neurotic fellow, everyone knows it and takes it seriously. The supply (Location 2336)

Consider that every day, 6,200 persons die in the United States, many of preventable causes. But the media only report the most anecdotal and sensational cases (hurricanes, freak accidents, small plane crashes), giving us a more and more distorted map of real risks. In (Location 2389)

To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as (Location 2762)

a philosopher, as illustrated in the following contemporary story. (Location 2762)

My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking. (Location 2834)

Education → Wealth and Economic Growth or Wealth and Economic Growth → Education (Location 3605)

Further, let me remind the reader that scholarship and organized education are not the same. (Location 3634)

Something hit me then. Nobody worries that a child ignorant of the various theorems of aerodynamics and incapable of solving an equation of motion would be unable to ride a bicycle. (Location 3845)

Or, another way to see it, studying the chemical composition of ingredients will make you neither a better cook nor a more expert taster—it might even make you worse at both. (Cooking is particularly humbling for teleology-driven fellows.) (Location 4087)

It turns out, strategic planning is just superstitious babble. For an illustration of business drift, rational and opportunistic business drift, take the following. Coca-Cola began as a pharmaceutical product. Tiffany & Co., the fancy jewelry store company, started life as a stationery store. (Location 4136)

In the antifragile case (of positive asymmetries, positive Black Swan businesses), such as trial and error, the sample track record will tend to underestimate the long-term average; it will hide the qualities, not the defects. (Location 4156)

In the fragile case of negative asymmetries (turkey problems), the sample track record will tend to overestimate the long-term average; it will hide the defects and display the qualities. (Location 4164)

I have a simple rule, that those who teach at Harvard should be expected to have much less understanding of things than cab drivers or people innocent of canned methods of inference (Location 4168)

But we find it hard to apply this lesson to technical skills acquired in schools, that is, to accept the crucial fact that what is picked (Location 4261)

up in the classroom stays largely in the classroom. (Location 4262)

Jumping from a height of thirty feet (ten meters) brings more than ten times the harm of jumping from a height of three feet (one meter)—actually, thirty feet seems to be the cutoff point for death from free fall. (Location 4722)