Some clarity: DEFENSE is when you defend your country at, or near, your borders. Not when you fight people several time zones away. Find another name… - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure.

The problem with the idea of "learning from one's mistakes" is that most of what people call mistakes aren't mistakes.

To illustrate that the "health benefits" of the Mediterranean diet aren't in the diet: people spend their lives climbing stairs and doing intermittent fasts.