If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don’t attend. People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity…or get another job.
If both the positive and the negative consequences of an action fell on its author, our learning would be fast. But often an action’s positive consequences benefit only its author, since they are visi...
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 then completely gave up reading newspapers and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of time (say one hour or more a day, enough time to read more than a hundred additional books...
I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
I suggest this passage from the German philosopher (this passage was detected, translated, and reviled by Karl Popper): Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material par...
I realized that if I were to start writing about the events later they would seem more … historical. There was a difference between the before and the after.
I have two further points to make on this subject. First, justification of overoptimism on grounds that it brought us here arises from a far more serious mistake about human nature: the belief that we...
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 found out that telling researchers This is where your methods work very well is vastly better than telling them This is what you guys don't know. So when I presented to what was until then the most...
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 feel anger and frustration when I think that one in ten Americans beyond the age of high school is on some kind of antidepressant, such as Prozac. Indeed, when you go through mood swings, you now ha...
I engage in a gambling strategy that has 999 chances in 1,000 of making $ 1 (event A) and 1 chance in 1,000 of losing $ 10,000 (event B), as in Table 6.1. My expectation is a loss of close to $ 9 (obt...
I discovered that I had been intuitively using the less-is-more idea as an aid in decision making (contrary to the method of putting a series of pros and cons side by side on a computer screen). For i...
I am never bothered by normal people; it is the bull***tter in the intellectual profession who bothers me.
I AM NOT SO INTELLIGENT 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. Besides, I believe...
Hume came to warn us against such knowledge, and to stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge
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.