The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions.
The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons w...
The central point: had Stiglitz been a businessman with his own money on the line, he would have blown up, terminated. Or had he been in nature, his genes would have been made extinct—so people with s...
The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without...
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 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...
Technothinkers tend to have an engineering mind—to put it less politely, they have autistic tendencies. While they don’t usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook cha...
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.
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...
Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens—usually.
Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.
People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog ownership.
People feel deep anxiety finding out that someone they thought was stupid is actually more intelligent than they are.
One would suppose that people living through the beginning of WWII had an inkling that something momentous was taking place. Not at all.*
Of course chance favors the prepared! Hard work, showing up on time, wearing a clean (preferably white) shirt, using deodorant, and some such conventional things contribute to success—they are certain...
Now I am punished by privilege and comfort—and I can’t resist comfort.
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,...