A Solution Waiting for a Problem Engineers tend to develop tools for the pleasure of developing tools, not to induce nature to yield its secrets. It so happens that some of these tools bring us more k...
Things always become obvious after the fact
You’d even rather have a failed real person than a successful one, as blemishes, scars, and character flaws increase the distance between a human and a ghost.
We can control a function of x, f(x), even if x remains vastly beyond our understanding.
The (stated) purpose of science is to get to the truth, not to give you a feeling of organization or make you feel better. We tend to use knowledge as therapy.
Second category, practitioners who, instead of studying future events, try to understand how things react to volatility (but practitioners are usually too busy practitioning to write books, articles,...
Research on happiness shows that those who live under a self-imposed pressure to be optimal in their enjoyment of things suffer a measure of distress.
Reality does not have the same closed and symmetric laws and regulations as games.
Often an action’s positive consequences benefit only its author, since they are visible, while the negative consequences, being invisible, apply to others, with a net cost to society. Consider
Newspapers do not have to have a screaming headline saying that nothing new is taking place (though the Bible was smart enough to declare ein chadash tachat hashemesh— nothing new under the sun, provi...
Never trust the words of a man who is not free.
Naïve empiricism, we have a natural tendency to look for instances that confirm our story and our vision of the world—these instances are always easy to find. Alas,
Minds are in the business of turning history into something smooth and linear, which makes us underestimate randomness. But when we see it, we fear it and overreact. Because of this fear and thirst fo...
Lead
It is not so easy to falsify, i.e., to state that something is wrong with full certainty. Imperfections
It did not so much judge the quality of a trader’s performance as encourage him to game the system by working for short-term profits at the expense of possible blowups—like
Had no name for the color blue but managed rather well without it—we stayed for a long part of our history culturally, not biologically, color blind.
Disconfirming instances are far more powerful in establishing truth. Yet
Adumbration
You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.