Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason.
I’ve looked in history for heroes who became heroes for what they did not do, but it is hard to observe nonaction; I could not easily find any.
I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst--those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists...
For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by lif...
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing
I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.
Simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession.
People can't predict how ong they will be happy with recently acquired objects, how long their marriages will last, how their new jobs will turn out, yet it's subatomic particles that they cite as lim...
The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.
Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of...
Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now con...
It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have...
Two weekends in Philadelphia are not twice as pleasant as a single one—I’ve tried.
The good is not as good as the absence of bad.
When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the-game-driven experiential mechanism. They lose control of their preferences, substituting constructed preferences for their own, complicating their liv...
There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.
Mental effort moves us into higher gear, activating more vigorous and more analytical brain machinery.
Life is sacrifice and risk taking, and nothing that doesn't entail some moderate amount of the former, under the constraint of satisfying the latter, is close to what we can call life. If you do not u...
A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see
All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.