If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.
I was once shown the script of a film based on a parable of a city completely ruled by randomness—very Borgesian. At set intervals, the ruler randomly assigns to the denizens a new role in the city. S...
I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
I repeat that we are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent one as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible because;...
I once procrastinated and kept delaying a spinal cord operation as a response to a back injury—and was completely cured of the back problem after a hiking vacation in the Alps, followed by weight-lift...
I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.
I have anecdotal evidence in my business that MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify matters a couple of steps beyond their requirement. (I beg the MBA reader not t...
I have always hated employment and the associated dependence on someone else’s arbitrary opinion, particularly when much of what’s done inside large corporations violates my sense of ethics.
I figured out that whatever I selected myself I could read with more depth and more breadth—there was a match to my curiosity. And I could take advantage of what people later pathologized as Attention...
I don’t run for trains. Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains...
I don’t mean just you, your cousin Joey, and me, but almost all social scientists who, for over a century, have operated under the false belief that their tools could measure uncertainty
I can find confirmation for just about anything, the
I believe that the principal asset I need to protect and cultivate is my deep-seated intellectual insecurity.
I am never bothered by normal people; it is the bull***tter in the intellectual profession who bothers me.
I am also realizing the nonlinear effect behind success in anything: It is better to have a handful of enthusiastic advocates than hordes of people who appreciate your work—better to be loved by a doz...
Huet presents arguments against causality that are quite potent—he states, for instance, that any event can have an infinity of possible causes.
However, our presence in the sample completely vitiates the computation of the odds.
How much you truly believe in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.
History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental...
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.