Thread on convexity and antifragility.These are the main points I made to 18 year olds in beginning Calculus, so the math is quite basic, yet elegant in its simplicity. From Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 1/

Follow the least boring/most entertaining path. Nobody ever learned a new language from nerds. Twitter helps. Follow someone without translation. Or, better, fight with her/him to break the boredom.

Not all self-labeled "libertarians" are sociopaths, misanthropes, or self-centered narcissists; not all sociopaths, misanthropes, & self-centered narcissists are libertarians. But the intersection is high! Good thread. [Princ Pol: How to purge libertarianism from these psychos]

Just realized that I missed something central: Yes Christianity stood ancient values on their head, with the glorification of the weak & downtrodden. But Shiism is EVEN MORE about the veneration of the Victim. medium.com/incerto/on-chr…

The best victories are the ones when you don’t need to openly fight against the competitor but can quietly subjugate it.

Innovation is art - it can’t be scaled. Scaling a team creates a hierarchy to reduce coordination costs. Hierarchy introduces the Principal-Agent problem. Agents optimize for status and cohesion over correctness. Going from zero to one requires a founder-led flat team.

Time spent thinking about the future is time spent away from your self.

Indifference is much more powerful than hate.

"My objective is to die with my shoes on." - Nassim Taleb

Reductionism. The cartoon version of science. At least when physicists do it they’re just being dumb and harmless, but health? Not good for society.

When academics say "almost always" they mean "always", when human beings say "always" they mean "almost always".

A culture should judge itself more than be proud of itself.

"Debating someone on social media is equivalent to looking for love in a bordello." - Nassim Taleb

The suppression of emotions has been vilified by modern society, in lockstep with moral relativism, ego stroking and inflated self importance. Emotions have been granted pre-approval regardless their cause or expression. Lifted onto pedestals of plastic, lionized for their own

If we want everything to remain as it is, then everything must change.

A quiet room is not the best place to achieve your desired state of mind. In fact, quite the opposite. A quiet room is doing most of the work for you. It is giving you the silence, with little in the way of distraction. Here, there is no juxtaposition between your surroundings

Beware of succeeding in ways that won’t matter.

"If you want to punish an enemy, help put him on a pedestal. He will hurt himself falling from it." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb #wisdom

Arguments take two forms: authentic & reverse-engineered. Authentic arguments emerge naturally from the situation itself. Reverse-engineered ones are constructed backward—designed to serve a preexisting urge to discredit or harm an antagonist. The first kind has few degrees of