Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.

Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.

Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.

Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.

My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates-and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain.

At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.

When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.