The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it get to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.
A saying by the brothers Geoff and Vince Graham summarizes the ludicrousness of scale-free political universalism. I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth – remember that you are a Black Swan.
No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.
The only definition of rationality that I’ve found that is practically, empirically, and mathematically rigorous is the following: what is rational is that which allows for survival. Unlike modern theories by psychosophasters, it maps to the classical way of thinking. Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is, to me, irrational.
The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions.
How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.
Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute.
Men destroy each other during war, themselves during peacetime.
My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.
Alexander said that it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion than an army of lions led by a sheep.
Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
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.
So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, focus on analyzing the speaker not the message, and you’ll win the argument. An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message. The psychologist.
For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life. Let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in the community, not the decorations on your lapel. If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions; fragile modern constructions.
One useful trick, I discovered, is to avoid listening to the question of the interviewer, and answer with whatever I have been thinking about recently. Remarkably, neither the interviewers nor the public notices the absence of correlation between question and answer.
It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one’s limitations – Scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.
A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.
The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.
People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.