Quotes About Survival

It hit me right there and then that these antifragile hormetic responses were just a form of redundancy, and all the ideas of Mother Nature converged in my mind. It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.

for Mother Nature, opinions and predictions don't count; surviving is what matters.

Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason.

Don't talk about "progress" in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.

For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. Mathematically, progress means that some new information is better than past information, not that the average of new information will supplant past information, which means that it is optimal for someone, when in doubt, to systematically reject the new idea, information, or method. Clearly and shockingly, always. Why?

One Thousand And One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker

Our aversion to variability and desire for order, and our acting on those feelings, have helped precipitate severe crises. Making something artificially bigger (instead of letting it die early if it cannot survive stressors) makes it more and more vulnerable to a very severe collapse-as I showed with the Black Swan vulnerability associated with an increase in size.

Just as we are not likely to mistake a bear for a stone (but likely to mistake a stone for a bear), it is almost impossible for someone rational, with a clear, uninfected mind, someone who is not drowning in data, to mistake a vital signal, one that matters for his survival, for noise.

Aside from the decorum of ancient thought as opposed to the coarseness of fresh ink, I have spent some time phrasing the idea in the mathematics of evolutionary arguments and conditional probability. For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out.

Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.

In a natural environment, people die without aging—or after a very short period of aging.

And entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth or even the mere survival of the economy.

The fact that you survived is a condition that may weaken your interpretation of the properties of the survival, including the shallow notion of "cause.

A system with skin-in-the-game requirements holds together through the notion of a sacrifice in order to protect the collective or entities higher in the hierarchy that are required to survive.

Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny.

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

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

survival pressures within the organism play a role in its overall improvement under external stress.

We sacrifice ourselves in favor of our genes, trading our fragility for their survival.

Things break on a small scale all the time, in order to avoid large-scale generalized catastrophes.

they unarguably saved more lives than were lost.

What survives must be good at serving some (mostly hidden) purpose that time can see but our eyes and logical faculties can't capture.

let governments predict (it makes officials feel better about themselves and justifies their existence) but do not set much store by what they say. Remember that the interest of these civil servants is to survive and self-perpetuate—not to get to the truth.

some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of "heuristics," these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.