Quotes About Harm

This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.

The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do no harm (primum non nocere); even more, we will argue, those who don't take risks should never be involved in making decisions.

Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it. For instance, many wreck their reputations merely by trying to defend them.

Life is sacrifice and risk taking, and nothing that doesn't entail some moderate amount of the former, under the constraint of satisfying the latter, is close to what we can call life. If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure.

Rank beliefs not by their plausibility but by how much harm they might cause

Statin drugs are meant to lower cholesterol in your blood. But there is an asymmetry, and a severe one. One needs to treat fifty high risk persons for five years to avoid a single cardiovascular event. Statins can potentially harm people who are not very sick, for whom the benefits are either minimal or totally nonexistent.

It is generally accepted that harm from doctors—not including risks from hospital germs—accounts for more deaths than any single cancer.

Know how to rank your beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

Let me warn against misinterpreting the message here. The argument is not against the notion of intervention; in fact I showed above that I am equally worried about underintervention when it is truly necessary. I am just warning against naive intervention and lack of awareness and acceptance of harm done by it.

The worst problem of modernity lies in the malignant transfer of fragility and antifragility from one party to the other, with one getting the benefits, the other (unwittingly) getting the harm, with such transfer facilitated by the growing wedge between the ethical and the legal.

So I end this section with a thought. It is quite perplexing that those from whom we have benefited the most aren't those who have tried to help us (say with "advice") but rather those who have actively tried—but eventually failed—to harm us.

The story of the Titanic illustrates the difference between gains for the system and harm to some of its individual parts.

some classes of people use hidden options and harm the collective without anyone realizing.

It is quite perplexing that those from whom we have benefited the most aren't those who have tried to help us (say with "advice") but rather those who have actively tried—but eventually failed—to harm us.

There is no penalty for opinion makers who harm society.

Anyone who causes harm by forecasting should be treated as either a fool or a lier. Some forecasters cause more damage to society than criminals.

just avoiding being hurt by them would have been sufficient.

This example not only gives us an idea of harm done by those who intervene, but, worse, it illustrates the lack of awareness of the need to look for a break-even point between benefits and harm.

Not understanding that doing nothing can be much more preferable to doing something potentially harmful.

Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

We can also see from the turkey story the mother of all harmful mistakes: mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence

is much easier to understand if something is harmed by volatility—hence fragile—than try to forecast harmful events, such as these oversized Black Swans. But only practitioners (or people who do things) tend to spontaneously get the point.

An intelligent life is all about such emotional positioning to eliminate the sting of harm, which as we saw is done by mentally writing off belongings so one does not feel any pain from losses. The volatility of the world no longer affects you negatively.