Kevin Reeve

“Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system. Indeed, confusing people a little bit is beneficial—it is good for you and good for them. For an application of the point in daily life, imagine someone extremely punctual and predictable who comes home at exactly six o’clock every day for fifteen years. You can use his arrival to set your watch. The fellow will cause his family anxiety if he is barely a few minutes late. Someone with a slightly more volatile—hence unpredictable—schedule, with, say, a half-hour variation, won’t do so.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works—we even seem to have evidence against it. A management scholar, William Starbuck, has published a few papers debunking the effectiveness of planning—it makes the corporation option-blind, as it gets locked into a non-opportunistic course of action.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“In a thick and captivating book, La rebellion française, the historian Jean Nicolas shows how the culture of rioting was extremely sophisticated—historically, it counts as the true French national sport.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder