Quotes About Progress

Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel—just as fire does.

So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.

Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For instance, you study every day and learn something in proportion to your studies. If you do not feel that you are going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized.

Systems learn by removing parts, via negativa.*4

The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, aggressive risk bearing rather than formal education.

Adam Smith himself made the analogy of the economy as a watch or a clock that once set in motion continues on its own.

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?

While we know that history flows forward, it is difficult to realize that we envision it backward. Why is it so?

Further, we are victims to a new disease, called in this book neomania, that makes us build Black Swan–vulnerable systems—"progress.

Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future, but that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo we do not know what we will know.

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

Science isn't the sum of what scientists think, but exactly as with markets. Had science operated by majority consensus, we would be still stuck in the Middle Ages.

Our sophistication continuously puts us ahead of ourselves, creating things we are less and less capable of understanding.

Scranton showed that we have been building and using jet engines in a completely trial-and-error experiential manner, without anyone truly understanding the theory. Builders needed the original engineers who knew how to twist things to make the engine work. Theory came later, in a lame way, to satisfy the intellectual bean counter.

my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn't introspect, doesn't exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on.

as societies gain in complexity, with more and more "cutting edge" sophistication in them, and more and more specialization, they become increasingly vulnerable to collapse.

In order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic (the entrepreneur is still alive, though perhaps morally broken and socially stigmatized

it took me a lifetime to figure out the second point: implementation does not necessarily proceed from invention. It, too, requires luck and circumstances.

innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity

And, what's worse, we didn't get where we are today thanks to policy makers—but thanks to the appetite for risks and errors of a certain class of people we need to encourage, protect, and respect.

for decades doctors never suspected that this "useless" tissue might actually have a use that escaped their detection. The

Every plane crash brings us closer to safety, improves the system, and makes the next flight safer…

others paid by the hour are not there yet.

we got here by accident does not mean that we should continue to take the same risks.