Steve Jobs: People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to...
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.
Some libertarians use the example of Drachten, a town in the Netherlands, in which a dream experiment was conducted. All street signs were removed. The deregulation led to an increase in safety, confi...
So just as Stoicism is the domestication, not the elimination, of emotions, so is the barbell a domestication, not the elimination, of uncertainty.
So from this we can see that there is a tension between nature and individual organisms. Everything alive or organic in nature has a finite life and dies eventually—even Methuselah lived less than a t...
Remember the psychological discussions on asymmetries in the perception of skills in the previous chapter? We see flaws in others and not in ourselves. Once again we seem to be wonderful at self-decei...
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
Popper’s falsificationism is intimately connected to the notion of an open society. An open society is one in which no permanent truth is held to exist; this would allow counter-ideas to emerge. Karl...
Patients who spend fifteen minutes every day writing an account of their daily troubles feel indeed better about what has befallen them. You
Outside of textbooks and casinos, probability almost never presents itself as a mathematical problem or a brain teaser.
Our sophistication continuously puts us ahead of ourselves, creating things we are less and less capable of understanding.
Our operation has a mortality rate of 1%. So far we have operated on ninety-nine patients with great success; you are our one hundreth, hence you have a 100% probability of dying on the table.
Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel—just as fire does.
One of the methods, called sortes virgilianae (fate as decided by the epic poet Virgil), involved opening Virgil’s Aeneid at random and interpreting the line that presented itself as direction for the...
One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. Statistics stay silent in us.
Now, in addition to these traits, he defaults to thinking that what he doesn’t see is not there, or what he does not understand does not exist. At the core, he tends to mistake the unknown for the non...
Note another element of Switzerland: it is perhaps the most successful country in history, yet it has traditionally had a very low level of university education compared to the rest of the rich nation...
No muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without consequence, change without aesthetics, age without values, life without effort, water without thirst, food without nourishment,...
No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.
Never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact - and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings.