Sublime

Our daily life is mostly made of cases in which we lose money and/or time and/or energy and/or appetite, cheerfulness and good health because of the improbable action of some preposterous creature who has nothing to gain and indeed gains nothing from causing us embarrassment, difficulties or harm. Nobody knows, understands or can possibly explain w

Terrorism is effective because it imposes costs on everyone, not just its direct victims. The most substantial of these indirect costs is fear of a future attack, even though such fear is grossly misplaced. The probability that an average American will die in a given year from a terrorist attack is roughly 1 in 5 million; he is 575 times more likel

In the market, prices may occasionally follow the lead of the worst investors. They are the ones making most of the trades.

Source: Carlo Cipolla, The Basic Law of Human Stupidity

When good and honest people can be incentivized into crazy behavior, it’s easy to underestimate the odds of the world going off the rails.

For John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, one of the main attractions of moving away from the gold standard was the reduction in the costs of goldmining that would ensue from switching to government‐issued paper money, whose cost of production is far lower than that of gold. They not only misunderstood that gold has very few resources going to i

Consider the saying often attributed to Stalin that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is statistics.

Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance where the tolerance of intolerance leads to rule of the latter. In a society of pacifists, the lone dissenter becomes the king.