The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut, r. Mar. 2026

p. 65 So we did what we had to do [in Hungary, pre-WWII]. We had fun. We played. We got drunk and danced from one war to the next. What else were we supposed to do? We all knew that the wonderful world that had been built for us was coming to an end. So our games were urgent. Necessary. We simply had to have fun. There was nothing else for us. Because we knew what was coming. I don't know how, we just did. All of us. Men and women. Rich and poor. Jews and goyim. All knew. So we behaved like children and did what children do best. Pretend that there was nothing wrong and continue to play. The world would have to take care of itself.

p. 198 You could tell the quality of his thinking by what he chose to ask (questions being the true measure of a man).

p. 221 "Gods are a biological necessity," he said to me on a particularly warm night at his home in Georgetown, during that last summer when he could still get around on crutches, "as integral to our species as language or opposable thumbs." According to [John von Neumann], faith had afforded the primeval peoples of the world a source of strength, power, and meaning that modern man lacked completely; and it was this lack, this profound loss, that now had to be addressed by science. "We have no guiding star," he told me, "nothing to look up or aspire to, so we are devolving, falling back into animality, losing the very thing that has let us advance so far beyond what was originally intended for us."

p. 271 "Our earthly existence, since it in itself has a very doubtful meaning, can only be a means towards a goal of another existence. The idea that everything in the world has a meaning is, after all, precisely analogous to the principle that everything has a cause, on which the whole of science rests." – Kurt Gödel, letter to his mother

p. 350 "After that, I [Lee Sedol] continued playing but I had already decided to retire. With the debut of AI, I've realized that I cannot be at the top, even if I make a spectacular comeback and return to being the number one player through frantic efforts. Even if I become the best that the world has ever known, there is an entity that cannot be defeated."

The Star Thrower by Loren Eiseley, r. Aug. 2016

p. xiii In creation there is not only a Yes but also a No; not only a height but also an abyss; not only clarity but also obscurity; not only progress and continuation but also impediment and limitation... not only value but also worthlessness.... It is true that individual creatures and men experience these things in most unequal measure, their lots being assigned by a justice which is curious or ver much concealed. Yet it is irrefutable that creation and creature are good even in the fact that all that is exists in this contrast and antithesis. - Ken Barth

p. xx A satisfactory human life, individually or collectively, is possible only if proper respect is paid to all three worlds. Without Prayer and Work, the Carnival laughter turns ugly, the comic obscenities grubby and pornographic, the mock aggression into real hatred and cruelty. (The hippies, it appears to me, are trying to recover the sense of Carnival which is so conspicuously absent in this age, but so long as they reject Work they are unlikely to succeed.) Without Laughter and Work, Prayer turns Gnostic, cranky, Pharisaic, while those who try to live by Work alone, without Laughter or Prayer, turn into insane lovers of power, tyrants who would enslave Nature to their immediate desires - an attempt which can only end in utter catastrophe, shipwreck on the Isle of the Sirens. - W. H. Auden

p. 32 I began dimly to remember a primitive dialogue as to whether God is a mist or merely a mist maker.... How else would so great a being, assuming his existence, be able throughly to investigate his world, or, perhaps, merely a world that he had come upon, than as he was now proceeding to do?

p. 69 By contrast, only two peoples in the world have known what it is to be alone: the polar Eskimos of the nineteenth century who thought they were the only men in the world and that the explorers who came to them were ghosts, and those inhabitants of the more remote Pacific islets who learned in astonishment that theirs was not the only land above the water that stretched, as they thought, to infinity.

p. 72 Man has always been a builder. Perhaps he has built best in loneliness. At least this appears to be the case in the isles of Polynesia.

p. 75 Finally, however, I sat alone with my glass, a little mellow, perhaps, enjoying the warmth of the fire and remembering the blue snowfields of the North as they should be remembered - in the comfort of warm rooms.

p. 88 We have learned the first biological lesson: that in each generation life passes through the eye of a needle. It exists for a time molecularly and in no recognizable semblance to its adult condition. It instructs its way again into man or reptile.

p. 106 "We must regard the organism as a configuration contrived to evade the tendency of the universal laws of nature," John Joly the geologist once remarked. Unlike the fire in a thicket, life burned cunningly and hoarded its resources. Energy provisions in the seed provided against death. Of all the unexpected qualities of an unexpected universe, the sheer organizing power of animal and plant metabolism is one of the most remarkable, but, as in the case of most everyday marvels, we take it for granted. Where it reaches its highest development, in the human mind, we forget it completely.

p. 110 There were eroded farms no longer running cattle and a diminishing population waiting, as this girl was waiting, for something they would never possess. They were, without realizing it, huntsmen without game, women without warriors. Obsolescence was upon their way of life.

p. 114 What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired an ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk?

p. 140 The power to change is both creative and destructive - a sinister gift, which, unrestricted, leads onward toward the formless and inchoate void of the possible. This force can only be counterbalanced by an equal impulse toward specificity. Form, once arisen, clings to its identity. Each species and each individual holds tenaciously to its present nature. Each strives to contain the creative and abolishing maelstrom that pours unseen through the generations. The past vanishes; the present momentarily persists; the future is potential only. In this specious present of the real, life struggles to maintain every manifestation, every individuality, that exists. In the end, life always fails, but the amorphous hurrying stream is held and diverted into new organic vessels in which form persists, though the form may not be that of yesterday.

p. 161 [Anecdote about the sunflower on the boxcar, growing there all summer, until boxcar suddenly hooked up and moving and the flower dying, shedding seeds...] A light not quite the sunlight of this earth was touching the flower, or perhaps it was the watering of my aging eye - who knows? The plant would not long survive its journey but the flower seeds were autumn-brown. At every jolt for miles they would drop along the embankment. They were travelers - travelers like Ishmael and myself, outlasting all fierce pursuits and destined to reemerge into future autumns. Like Ishmael, I thought, they will speak with the voice of the one true agent: "I only am escaped to tell thee."

p. 165 We fear the awesome powers we have lifted out of nature and cannot return to her. We fear the weapons we have made, the hatreds we have engendered. We fear the crush of fanatic people to whom we readily sell these weapons. We fear for the value of the money in our pockets that stands symbolically for food and shelter. We fear the growing power of the state to take all these things from us. We fear to walk in our streets at evening. We have come to fear even our scientists and their gifts. We fear, in short, as that self-sufficient Eskimo of the long night had never feared. Our minds, if not our clothes, are hung with invisible amulets: nostrums changed each year for our bodies whether it be chlorophyl toothpaste, the signs of astrology, or cold cures that do not cure: witchcraft nostrums for our society as it fractures into contending multitudes all crying for liberation without responsibility.

p. 167 The truth is that no man expounds upon great ideas to a single audience. He speaks, instead, to audiences, and these in turn will be receiving his message, like the far-traveling light from a star, sometimes centuries after he has delivered it. Man is not one public; he is many and the messages he receives are likely to become garbled in transmission. Again, the ideas of the most honest and well-intentioned scholar may be distorted, reoriented, or trimmed to fit the public needs of a given epoch. In addition, it could be argued that no great act of scientific synthesis is really fixed in the public mind until that public has been prepared to receive it through anticipatory glimpses.

p. 175 When I was young, in a time of boyhood marked by a world as fresh and green and utterly marvelous as on the day of its creation, I found myself attracted by a huge tropical shell which lay upon my aunt's dressing table.

p. 178 ...man possesses latent mental powers beyond what he might culturally express in a given epoch.

p. 178 [French biologist Jean Rostand] knew, with a surety our age is in danger of losing, that if there was ever a good man there will be more.

p. 189 It is remembered that when at last an acquaintance came to ask of Thoreau on his deathbed if he had made his peace with God, the Visitor in him responded simply, "We have never quarreled."

p. 190 For this reason [Thoreau] tended to see men at a distance. For the same reason he saw himself as a first settler in nature, his house the oldest in the settlement. Thoreau reflected in his mind the dreamers of the westward crossing; in this he is totally American.

p. 194 Thoreau, in his final journals, had said that the ancients with their gorgons and sphinxes could imagine more than existed. Modern men, by contrast, could not imagine so much as exists. For more than one hundred years that statement has stood to taunt us. Every succeeding year has proved Thoreau right. The one great hieroglyph, nature, is as unreadable as it ever was and so is her equally wild and unpredictable offspring, man.

p. 201 "There is no more fatal blunderer," [Emerson] protested, "than he who consumes the greater part of life getting a living."

p. 207 Even the extinct head have plucked the great web of life in such a manner that the future still vibrates to their presence.

p. 210 Another of these episodes is reflected in the origins of the human mind. It represents, in a sense, a quantum step: the emergence of genuine novelty. It does so because the brain brought into being what would have been, up until the time of its appearance, an inconceivable event - the world of culture. The mundus alter - this other intangible, faery world of dreams, fantasies, invention - has been flowing through the heads of men since the first ape-man succeeded in cutting out a portion of his environment and delineating it in a transmissible word. With that word a world arose which will die only when the last man utters the last meaningful sound.

p. 220 Our lives are the creation of memory and the accompanying power to extend ourselves outward into ideas and relive them. The finest intellect is that which employs an invisible web of gossamer running into the past as well as across the minds of living men and which constantly responds to the vibrations transmitted through these tenuous lines of sympathy.

p. 226 ...each great novel is a separate and distinct world operating under its own laws with a flora and fauna totally its own. There is communication, or the work is a failure, but the communication releases our own visions, touches some highly personal chord in our own experience.

p. 236 It is not my intention here to decry learning, but only to say that we must understand that learning is endless and that nowhere does it lead us behind the existent world. It may reduce the prejudices of ignorance, set our bones, build our cities. In itself it will never make us ethical men. Yet because ours, we conceive, is an age of progress, and because we know more about time and history than any men before us, we fallaciously equate ethical advance with scientific progress in a point-to-point relationship. Thus as society improves physically, we assume the improvement of the individual...

p. 236 We crossed the divide then, picking our way in places scoured by ancient ice action, through boulder fields where nothing moved, and yet where one could feel time like an enemy hidden behind each stone.

p. 242 If all life were to be swept from the world, leaving only its chemical constituents, no visitor from another star would be able to establish the reality of such a phantom. The dust would lie without visible protest, as it does now in the moon's airless craters, or in the road before our door. Yet this is the same dust which, dead, quiescent, and unmoving, when taken up in the process known as life, hears music and responds to it, weeps bitterly over time and loss, or is oppressed by the looming future that is, on any materialist terms, the veriest shadow of nothing.

p. 242 "The special value of science," a perceptive philosopher once wrote, "lies not in what it makes of the world, but in what it makes of the knower."

p. 244 In man, I know now, there is no such thing as wisdom. I have learned this with my face against the ground. It is a very difficult thing for a man to grasp today, because of his power; yet in his brain there is really only a sort of universal marsh, spotted at intervals by quaking green islands representing the elusive stability of modern science - islands frequently gone as soon as glimpsed. It is our custom to deny this; we are men of precision, measurement and logic; we abhor the unexplainable and reject it. This, too, is a green island.

p. 244 I no longer believed that nature was either natural or unnatural, only that nature now appears natural to man. But the nature that appears natural to man is another version of the muskrat's world under the boat dock, or the elusive sparks over which the physicist made his trembling passage. They were appearances, specialized insights, but unreal because in the constantly onrushing future they were swept away.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, r. Jun. 2016

p. 267 (Putnam and Campbell) "By many different measures, religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans - they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life."

p. 267 Putnam and Campbell reject the New Atheist emphasis on belief and reach a conclusion straight out of Durkheim: "It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing."

p. 292 For example, on a small island or in a small town, you typically don't need to lock your bicycle, but in a big city in the same country, if you only lock the frame, your wheels may get stolen. Being small, isolated, or morally homogeneous are examples of environmental conditions that increase the moral capital of a community. That doesn't mean that small islands and small towns are better places to live overall - the diversity and crowding of big cities makes them more creative and interesting places for many people - but that's the trade-off. (Whether you'd trade away some moral capital to gain some diversity and creativity will depend in part on your brain's settings on traits such as openness to experience and threat sensitivity, and this is part of the reason why cities are usually so much more liberal than the countryside.)

p. 294 Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you're asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism - which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity - is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

p. 294 (Bertrand Russell) "It is clear that each party to this dispute - as to all that persist through long periods of time - is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.

p. 305 I find it ironic that liberals generally embrace Darwin and reject "intelligent design" as the explanation for design and adaptation in the natural world, but they don't embrace Adam Smith as the explanation for design and adaptation in the economic world. They sometimes prefer the "intelligent design" of socialist economies, which often ends in disaster from a utilitarian point of view.

p. 317 If you bring one thing home from this last part of the trip, may I suggest that it be the image of a small bump on the back of our heads - the hive switch, just under the skin, waiting to be turned on. We've been told for fifty years now that human beings are fundamentally selfish. We're assaulted by reality TV programs showing people at their worst. Some people actually believe that a woman should shout "fire" if she's being raped, on the grounds that everyone is so selfish that they won't even come out to investigate unless they fear for their own lives. It's not true. We may spend most of our waking hours advancing our own interests, but we all have the capacity to transcend self-interest and become simply a part of a whole. It's not just a capacity; it's the portal to many of life's most cherished experiences.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, r. Apr. 2015

p. 1 Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.

p. 11 History and societies do not crawl. They makes jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Ye we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.

p. 48 Let me insist that erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar.

p. 94 A school allows someone with unusual ideas with the remote possibility of a payoff to find company and create a microcosm insulated from others. The members of the group can be ostracized together - which is better than being ostracized alone. If you engage in a Black Swan-dependent activity, it is better to be part of a group.

p. 119 My being here is a consequential low-probability occurrence, and I tend to forget it.

p. 133 I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs…. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being. Also, bear in mind how shallow we are with probability, the mother of all abstract notions. You do not have to do much more in order to gain a deeper understanding of things around you. Above all, learn to avoid tunneling.

p. 144 Remember that we treat ideas like possessions, and it will be hard for us to process them.

p. 187 Always remember that "R-square" is unfit for Extremistan; it is only good for academic promotion.

p. 193 …the relationship between the past and the future does not learn from the relationship between the past and the past previous to it. There is a blind spot: when we think of tomorrow we do not frame it in terms of what we thought about yesterday on the day before yesterday. Because of this introspective defect we fail to learn about the difference between our past predictions and the subsequent outcomes. When we think of tomorrow, we project it as another yesterday.

p. 194 …an element in the mechanics of how the human mind learns from the past makes us believe in definitive solutions - yet not consider that those who preceded us thought that they too had definitive solutions. We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day.

p. 198 History is useful for the thrill of knowing the past, and for the narrative (indeed), provided it remains a harmless narrative. One should learn under severe caution. History is certainly not a place to theorize or derive general knowledge, nor is it meant to help with the future, without some caution…. The empirical doctor's approach to the problem of induction was to know history without theorizing from it. Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much - but if you do, do not make big scientific claims. Remember that the empirical skeptics had respect for custom: they used it as a default, a basis for action, but not for more than that.

p. 210 Indeed, the notion of asymmetric outcomes is the central idea of this book: I will never get to know the unknown since, by definition, it is unknown. However, I can always guess how it might affect me, and I should base my decision around that.

p. 211 This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty.

p. 217 Note that scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people's work, and thus cliques of people who quote one another are formed (it's an "I quote you, you quote me" type of business).

p. 227 But I find the emphasis on economic inequality, at the expense of other types of inequality, extremely bothersome. Fairness is not exclusively an economic matter; it becomes less and less so when we are satisfying our basic material needs. It is pecking order that matters! The superstars will always be there…. The disproportionate share of the very few in intellectual influence is even more unsettling than the unequal distribution of wealth - unsettling because, unlike the income gap, no social policy can eliminate it.

p. 241 I always remember my father's injunction that in medio stat virtus, "virtue lies in moderation."

p. 255 My erudite and polymathic father liked the company of extremely cultured Jesuit priests. I remember these Jesuit visitors occupying my chair at the dining table. I recall that one had a medical degree and a PhD in physics, yet taught Aramaic to locals in Beirut's Institute of Eastern Languages. His previous assignment could have been teaching high school physics, and the one before that was perhaps in the medical school. This kind of erudition impressed my father far more than scientific assembly-line work.

p. 256 The scientific association with a big idea, the "brand name," goes to the one who connects the dots, not the one who makes a casual observation…. In the end it is those who derive consequences and seize the importance of the ideas, seeing their real value, who win the day. They are the ones who can talk about the subject.

p. 268 What I am talking about is opacity, incompleteness of information, the invisibility of the generator of the world. History does not reveal its mind to us - we need to guess what's inside of it.

p. 289 Philosophers like to practice philosophical thinking on me-too subjects that other philosophers like to call philosophy, and they leave their minds at the door when they are outside these subjects.

p. 290 A scholar should not be a library's tool for making another library, as in the joke by Daniel Dennett.

p. 296 I worry far more about the "promising" stock market, particularly the "safe" blue chip stocks, than I do about speculative ventures - the former present invisible risks, the latter offer no surprises since you know how volatile they are and can limit your downside by investing smaller amounts.

p. 297 Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behaviour, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.

p. 297 I am sometimes taken aback by how people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff, or a rude reception…. We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportion…. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth - remember you are a Black Swan.

p. 300 After a long but soothing lachrymal episode, Yevgenia thought of the characters in the rainy novel of Georges Simenon and Graham Greene. They lived in a state of numbing and secure mediocrity. Second-rateness had charm, Yevgenia thought, and she had always preferred charm over beauty.

p. 307 …almost all academic papers are made to bore, impress, provide credibility, intimidate even, be presented at meetings, but not to be read except by suckers (or detractors) or, even worse, graduate students.

p. 312 First, Mother Nature likes redundancies, three different types of redundancies. The first, the simplest to understand, is defensive redundancy, the insurance type of redundancy that allows you to survive under adversity, thanks to the availability of spare parts. Look at the human body. We have two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys, even two brains (with the possible exception of corporate executives) - and each has more capacity than needed in ordinary circumstances. So redundancy equals insurance, and the apparent inefficiencies are associated with the costs of maintaining these spare parts and the energy needed to keep them around in spite of their idleness. The exact opposite of redundancy is naïve optimization.

p. 313 Felix qui nihil debet goes the Roman proverb: "Happy is he who owes nothing." Grandmothers who survived the Great Depression would have advised the exact opposite of debt: redundancy; they would urge us to have several years of income in cash before taking any personal risk - exactly my barbell idea of Chapter 11, in which one keeps high cash reserves while taking more aggressive risks but with a small portion of the portfolio.

p. 316 To those who say "We have no proof we are harming nature," a sound response is "We have no proof that we are not harming nature, either,"; the burden of proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system. Furthermore we should not "try to correct" the harm done, as we may be creating another problem we do not know much about currently.

p. 319 This makes me reflect on the foolishness of thinking that books are there to be read and could be replaced by electronic files. Think of the spate of functional redundancies provided by books. You cannot impress your neighbors with electronic files. You cannot prop up your ego with electronic files. Objects seem to have invisible but significant auxiliary functions that we are not aware of consciously, but that allow them to thrive…

p. 319 …people like to go to a precise destination, rather than face some degree of uncertainty, even if beneficial.

p. 323 One useful trick, I discovered, is to avoid listening to the question of the interviewer, and answer with whatever I have been thinking about recently. Remarkably, neither the interviewers nor the public notices the absence of correlation between question and answer.

p. 326

p. 328 I lack what the biologist Robert Sapolsky calls the beneficial aspect of acute stress, compared to the deleterious one of dull stress - another barbell, for no stress plus a little bit of extreme stress is vastly better than a little bit of stress (like mortgage worries) all the time.

p. 330 So The Black Swan is about human error in some domains, swelled by a long tradition of scientism and a plethora of information that fuels confidence without increasing knowledge. It covers the expert problem - harm caused by reliance on scientific-looking charlatans, with or without equations, or regular noncharlatanic scientists with a bit more confidence about their methods than the evidence warrants. The focus is on not being the turkey in places where it matters, though there is nothing wrong in being a fool where that has no effect.

p. 333 Indeed, the intelligent, curious, and open-minded amateur is my friend. A pleasant surprise for me was to discover that the sophisticated amateur who uses books for his own edification, and the journalist, could understand my ideas much better than professionals. Professional readers, less genuine, either read too quickly or have an agenda.

p. 334 …many readers (say, those who work in forecasting or banking) do not understand that the "actionable step" for them is simply to quit their profession and do something more ethical.

p. 334 …as almost all business books can be reduced to a few pages without any loss of their message and essence; novels and philosophical treatments cannot be compressed.

p. 334 …evolution does not work by teaching, but destroying.

p. 336 For I had undergone a difficult psychological moment, after the publication of The Black Swan, what the French call traversée du désert, when you go through the demoralizing desiccation and disorientation of crossing a desert in search of an unknown destination, or a more or less promised land. I had a rough time, shouting "Fire! Fire! Fire!" about the hidden risks in the system, and hearing people ignoring the content and instead just criticizing the presentation, as if they were saying "your diction in shouting 'Fire!' is bad." For example, the curator of a conference known as TED (a monstrosity that turns scientists and thinkers into low-level entertainers, like circus performers) complained that my presentation style did not conform to his taste in slickness…

p. 338 When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people's opinion, freer, more real.

p. 361 It is much more sound to take risks you can measure than to measure the risks you are taking.

p. 362 David's comments also inspired me to focus more on iatrogenics, harm caused by the need to use quantitative models.

p. 368 How do you live long? By avoiding death. Yet people do not realize that success consists mainly in avoiding losses, not in trying to derive profits.

p. 368 Science, particularly its academic version, has never liked negative results, let alone the statement and advertising of its own limits. The reward system is not set up for it. You get respect for doing funambulism or spectator sports - following the right steps to become "the Einstein of Economics" or "the next Darwin" rather than give society something real by debunking myths or by cataloguing where our knowledge stops.

p. 371 Remember that the burden of proof lies on someone disturbing a complex system, not on the person protecting the status quo.

p. 371 Redundancy (in terms of having savings and cash under the mattress) is the opposite of debt. Psychologists tell us that getting rich does not bring happiness - if you spend your savings. But if you hide it under the mattress, you are less vulnerable to a Black Swan.

p. 371 Overspecialization is not a great idea. Consider what can happen to you if your job disappears completely. Someone who is a Wall Street analyst moonlighting as a bellydancer will do a lot better in a financial crisis than someone who is just an analyst.

p. 377 This is my Plan B. I kept looking at the position of my own grave. A Black Swan cannot so easily destroy a man who has an idea of his final destination. I felt robust.

p. 378