It is just that narrative can be lethal when used in the wrong places.
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 sp...
Indeed, people tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of national identity, which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors, was shown to be a total fiction. (National trait...
In spite of what is studied in business schools concerning economies of scale, size hurts you at times of stress; it is not a good idea to be large during difficult times.
In finance, for instance, people use flimsy theories to manage their risks and put wild ideas under rational scrutiny.
In 1960 Taiwan had a much lower literacy rate than the Philippines and half the income per person; today Taiwan has ten times the income. At
If you want to study classical values such as courage or learn about stoicism, don’t necessarily look for classicists. One is never a career academic without a reason. Read the texts themselves: Senec...
Ideas come and go, stories stay.
I discovered that it is much more effective to act like a nice guy and be reasonable if you prove willing to go beyond just verbiage. You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in...
Greenspan’s actions were harmful, but even if he knew that, it would have taken a bit of heroic courage to justify inaction in a democracy where the incentive is to always promise a better outcome tha...
Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.
Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interes...
For if you think that education causes wealth, rather than being a result of wealth, or that intelligent actions and discoveries are the result of intelligent ideas, you will be in for a surprise. Let...
Everything nonstable or breakable has had ample chance to break over time.
Events that are nonrepeatable are ignored before their occurrence, and overestimated after (for a while). After
Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow is one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is no...
By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then...
But simplicity is not so simple to attain. Steve Jobs figured out that you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to...
As Ennius wrote, The good is mostly in the absence of bad; Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali.
Almost all people answer that the opposite of fragile is robust, resilient, solid, or something of the sort. But the resilient, robust (and company) items that neither break nor improve, so you would...