The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.
The best way to prove the arbitrary character of these categories, and the contagion effect they produce, is to remember how frequently these clusters reverse in history. Today’s alliance between Chri...
The beast in this book is not just the bell curve and the self-deceiving statistician, nor the Platonified scholar who needs theories to fool himself with. It is the drive to focus on what makes sense...
The British government documents, as early as fifty years ago, an aim for education other than the one we have today: raising values, making good citizens, and learning, not economic growth (they were...
The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it.
Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.
Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.
Steve Jobs: «La gente pensa che essere concentrati significhi dire sì alla cosa sulla quale ci si deve focalizzare. Ma non è affatto così. Significa dire no ad altre cento buone idee. Dovete scegliere...
Something has worked in the past, until—well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.
Some people are only funny when they try to be serious.
Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.
So I stayed in the quant and trading businesses (I’m still there), but organized myself to do minimal but intense (and entertaining) work, focus only on the most technical aspects, never attend busine...
So I end this section with a thought. It is quite perplexing that those from whom we have benefited the most aren’t those who have tried to help us (say with advice) but rather those who have actively...
So I disagree with the followers of Marx and and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards...
Silver Rule (negative golden rule): Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. Note the difference from the Golden Rule, as the silver one prevents busybodies from attempting to ru...
Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens—usually.
Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong.
People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog ownership.
Our human race is affected by a chronic underestimation of the possibility of the future straying from the course initially envisioned (in addition to other biases that sometimes exert a compounding e...
One would suppose that people living through the beginning of WWII had an inkling that something momentous was taking place. Not at all.*