Statistics... is all based on... the steady augmentation of the confidence level... [F]or an n times increase in sample size, we increase our knowled… - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Assume that you live in a town with two hospitals — one large, the other small. On a given day 60 percent of those born in one of the two hospitals are boys. Which hospital is it likely to be?

People feel totally lost (& deep anxiety) finding out that someone they held for stupid is actually more intelligent than they are.

Whenever you hear a snotty (and frustrated) European middlebrow presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as “uncultured,” “unintellectual,” and “poor in math” because, unlike his peers, Americans are not into equation drills and the constructions middlebrows call “high culture” — like knowledge of Goethe’s inspirational (and central) trip to Italy, or familiarity with the Delft school of painting. Yet the person making these statements is likely to be addicted to his iPod, wear blue jeans, and use Microsoft Word to jot down his “cultural” statements on his PC, with some Google searches here and there interrupting his composition. Well, 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 globalization has allowed the United States to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the production of concepts and ideas, that is, the scalable part of the products, and, increasingly, by exporting jobs, separate the less scalable components and assign them to those happy to be paid by the hour.