Quotes About Flexibility

If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds....

There is a Yiddish saying: "If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind.

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore less fooled by their powers. They become dangerous when we forget that.

We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws. I

The model was right, it worked well, but the game turned out to be a different one than anticipated.

Don't look for the precise and local. Simply; do not be narrow minded.

it so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers. It is also far more tolerant of bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and error. And

Frano Barovi? reading this chapter wrote to me: "Machines: use it and lose it; organisms: use it or lose it." Also note that everything alive needs stressors, but not all machines need to be left alone—a point we will visit in our discussion of annealing. But

The Procrustean bed in life consists precisely in simplifying the non-linear and making it linear—the simplification that distorts.

A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situations of conflict. Say

the antifragile benefits from volatility and disorder, the fragile is harmed.

The more uncertainty, the more valuable the option.

Once in a while you encounter members of the human species with so much intellectual superiority that they can change their minds effortlessly.

Beware of precise plans by governments. As

Options like dispersion of outcomes and don't care about the average too much.

show how some degree of unpredictability (or lack of knowledge) can be beneficial to our defective species.

Nature is all about the exploitation of optionality; it illustrates how optionality is a substitute for intelligence.

There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists—or anyone.

my ideas on redundancy in systems.

he understood optionality mathematically, but not really outside the equation.

An option hides where we don't want it to hide. I will repeat that options benefit from variability, but also from situations in which errors carry small costs. So

benefits from volatility and variability.