Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the tendency to agree to terms without understanding their implications.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out the common practice of users quickly accepting digital disclosures and terms of service without actually reading or comprehending the content. This behavior raises concerns about the transparency and responsibility of tech companies, as individuals often relinquish their rights and privacy unknowingly, becoming vulnerable to unfavorable conditions set forth in these agreements.
In practice
During a tech conference, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of understanding digital consent.
Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.
Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.
A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)
Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn't matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state
The tech industry - and, more specifically, Silicon Valley - continues to stumble forward in earnest about how few women are represented in its top ranks of management and on its boards.
Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution.
t century, hundreds of millions - and eventually billions - of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet.
But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.
No matter what your profession β doctor, lawyer, architect, accountant β if you are an American, you better be good at the touchy-feely service stuff, because anything that can be digitized can be outsourced to either the smartest or the cheapest producer.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.