It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent studying the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it...
If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and please don’t listen to music.
A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have a...
The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves.
Start by being nice to every person you meet. But if someone tries to exercise power over you, exercise power over him.
So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.
My principle activity is to tease those who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously.
Effectively, there is no democracy without such an unconditional symmetry in the rights to express yourself, and the gravest threat is the slippery slope in the attempts to limit speech on grounds tha...
Artificial, man-made mechanical and engineering contraptions with simple responses are complicated, but not complex, as they don’t have interdependencies. You push a button, say, a light switch, and g...
A central argument is never a summary. It is more like a generator.
I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.
We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
Too much success is the enemy, too much failure is demoralizing.
There is such a thing as nonnerdy applied mathematics: find a problem first, and figure out the math that works for it (just as one acquires language), rather than study in a vacuum through theorems a...
There is a Yiddish saying: If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind. If I am going to be fooled by randomness, it better be of the beautiful (and harmless) kind.
There is a Yiddish saying: If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind.
The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don’t learn rules, just facts, and only facts.
Stoicism’s Emotional Robustification Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.
Nykyaika: loimme nuoruuden ilman sankaruutta, iän ilman viisautta ja elämän ilman loistoa.