The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.
Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it.
Life is sacrifice and risk taking, and nothing that doesn’t entail some moderate amount of the former, under the constraint of satisfying the latter, is close to what we can call life. If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure.
Never hire an academic unless his function is to partake of the rituals of writing papers or taking exams.
Being self-owned is a state of mind.
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author’s nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.
One Thousand And One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker.
Learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once.
A central argument is never a summary. It is more like a generator.
We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws. I.
Metric-lowering drugs are particularly vicious because of a legal complexity. The doctor has the incentive to prescribe it because should the patient have a heart attack, he would be sued for negligence; but the error in the opposite direction is not penalized at all, as side effects do not appear at all as being caused by the medicine.
Don’t talk about “progress” in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.
If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas.
Almost all those caught making a logical fallacy interpret it as a “disagreement.
People feel deep anxiety finding out that someone they thought was stupid is actually more intelligent than they are.
The quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome.
The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components.
The Golden Rule wants you to Treat others the way you would like them to treat you. The more robust Silver Rule says Do not treat others the way you would not like them to treat you.
If you want to accelerate someone’s death, give him a personal doctor. I don’t mean provide him with a bad doctor: just pay for him to choose his own. Any doctor will do. This may be the only possible way to murder someone while staying squarely within the law. We can see from the tonsillectomy story that access to data increases intervention, causing us to behave like the neurotic fellow.
If my brain can ttell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot.