Christopher Langner

“We are gliding into disorder, but not necessarily bad disorder. This implies that we will see more periods of calm and stability, with most problems concentrated into a small number of Black Swans.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“The new world of communication is a blessing for the citizens of the world trained to think critically and knowledgeable about history. But what about citizens who have been seduced by the world of life as entertainment and commerce? They have been educated, in good part, by a world in which negative emotional provocation is the rule rather than the exception and where the best solutions for a problem have to do primarily with short-term self-interests. Can they really be blamed?”
― António R. Damásio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind

“Medieval medicine was also based on equilibrium ideas when it was top-down and similar to theology. Luckily its practitioners went out of business, as they could not compete with the bottom-up surgeons, ecologically driven former barbers who gained clinical experience, and after whom a-Platonic clinical science was born. If I am alive, today, it is because scholastic top-down medicine went out of business a few centuries ago.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable