The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dominance of the Stubborn Minority

More wisdom from Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

This rule has been hiding in plain sight; but Taleb drags it out in the open as the most important asymmetry affecting our daily lives and perhaps the future of civilization. The title of this po More...

The Wisdom of Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Ethics don’t scale, Taleb says in his latest book, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life.

People tend to be virtuous in small groups, he says; but, once the groups get large, ethical rules lose their More...

Rules for Detecting BS

Borrowed from Astronomer Carl Sagan.

He called them rules for avoiding baloney but he wrote at a politer time. Given the flood of alleged science on the Internet and the impossibility of fact-checking it all, these rules are even more More...

Don’t Panic!

No question these are scary times. The new President, to be charitable, has made a lot of rooky mistakes. His grasp on reality slips in the face of any criticism, and he is faster to go on an ad hominem attack than a pit bull. Things are pretty scary on the other side as well. Most of th More...

It Depends How You Ask the Question – The Asian Disease Problem

Which explains a lot of where we are today

Quotes are from Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project describing the work of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman an More...

Don’t Believe the Experts

A frightening study

We know from recent experience that political experts don’t have a very good track record but we’d all like to think that a doctor’s opinion is a fact. This scary old story is from Michael Lewis’ new book More...

Borrow a Book with Your Kindle

If you're an Amazon Prime member and if you own a Kindle, you can borrow books "free" – one book per month, anyway. You do this through the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. You can go to the Library from your Kindle Fire directl More...

Grumby, Kindle, and the Flash Crash

Grumbys caused the flash crash of the American stock market on May 6^th. Readers of Andy Kessler's Grumby knew this as early as June 11^th when the More...

The Interpreter’s Tale – Now on Kindle

The pickpocket More...

Kindle for Authors

Kindle ought to be the answer to an author's dream But, for now, it is an almost insurmountable marketing challenge. Read on to learn what I'm trying

No expensive software or hardware is needed to create a Kindle book. Assuming you can write to begin with, you can create a book wi More...