The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how cor...
The computer programmer creates the only path available to the computer user; the effect of his decisions on others is masked by their abstraction.
The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted.
So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative. The
One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.
Los sujetos no elegían entre cosas. Elegían entre descripciones de cosas.
Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was buy Ireland. From each other. An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Iris...
Knowledge is literally prediction, said Morey. Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome. Literally
It’s taboo, he said. When they ask you why you want to be an investment banker, you’re supposed to talk about the challenges, and the thrill of doing deals, and the excitement of working with such hig...
It was like a broken slot machine in the casino that pays off every time. It would keep paying off until someone said something about it; but no one who played the slot machine had any interest in poi...
It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.
In 2008 it was the entire financial system that was at risk. We were still short. But you don’t want the system to crash. It’s sort of like the flood’s about to happen and you’re Noah. You’re on the a...
If you challenge conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.Bill James
If you are a self-possessed man with a healthy sense of detachment from your bank account and someone writes you a cheque for tens of millions of dollars you probably behave as if you have won a sweep...
He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.
For geniuses, they are really dumb, she said. Some of them are really pampered: They can’t even put together a cardboard box. They don’t think you do something. They think you call somebody.
For a technology company to succeed, he argued, it needed always to be looking to destroy itself. If it didn’t, someone else would.
At one point he turned to Christie and said, Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.
After Gell-Man was done, Amos said, You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are.
A Home without Equity Is Just a Rental with Debt,