By creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable w...
But at least I know that I cannot forecast and a small number of people (those I care about) take that as an asset.
Bottom-up political systems, and
A system that doesn’t have a mechanism of skin in the game, with a buildup of imbalances, will eventually blow up and self-repair that way. If it survives.
A saying from 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 ar...
[T]he worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a bit deeper.
You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.
You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.
You don't become completely free just by avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.
You can test a given rule either directly, by looking at instances where it works, or indirectly, by focusing on where it does not work. As we saw earlier, disconfirming instances are far more powerfu...
You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references money in his conversation.
You can imagine how distraught I feel when I hear about the glorified heroism-free middle class values, which, thanks to globalization and the Internet, have spread to any place easily reached by Brit...
You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can w...
Yet 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. Less is more a...
Yet in practice it is the negative that’s used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do...
Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, it will eventually destroy our world. So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. Simply, they viol...
While we have a highly unstable memory, a diary provides indelible facts recorded more or less immediately; it thus allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events...
While the meetings included traders, that is, people who are judged on their numerical performance, it was mostly a forum for salespeople (people capable of charming customers), and the category of en...
While in the past people of rank or status were those and only those who took risks, who had the downside for their actions, and heroes were those who did so for the sake of others, today the exact re...
While a ten-year survival rate for a trader is in the single digits, that of a risk manager is close to 100%).