"So the central tenet of the epistemology I advocate is as follows: we
know a lot more what is wrong than what is right, or, phrased according
to the fragile/robust classification, negative knowledge (what is wrong,
what does not work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge
(what is right, what works). So knowledge grows by subtraction much more
than by addition—given that what we know today might turn out to be
wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least
not easily. If I spot a black swan (not capitalized), I can be quite
certain that the statement “all swans are white” is wrong. But even if I
have never seen a black swan, I can never hold such a statement to be
true. Rephrasing it again: since one small observation can disprove a
statement, while millions can hardly confirm it, disconfirmation is more
rigorous than confirmation."
-Nassim Taleb, Antifragile
