What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.
So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.
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...
A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion.
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.
The quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome.
The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse.
The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom….Soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and...
Start by being nice to every person you meet. But if someone tries to exercise power over you, exercise power over him.
My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call belief) play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates—and it is almost a...
I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.
Further, the problem is not just that Mithridatization and hormesis can be known in (some) medical circles and missed in other applications such as socioeconomic life. Even within medicine, some get i...
I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are m...
You view the world from a model.
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...
The Discovery of France,
Stoicism’s Emotional Robustification Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.
Procrustes, in Greek mythology, was the cruel owner of a small estate in Corydalus in Attica, on the way between Athens and Eleusis, where the mystery rites were performed. Procrustes had a peculiar s...