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April 5 - April 9, 2018
I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
In nature we never repeat the same motion; in captivity (office, gym, commute, sports), life is just repetitive-stress injury. No randomness.
If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead—the more precision, the more dead you are.
You have a calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.
Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.
The main reason to go to school is to learn how not to think like a professor.
It is the appearance of inconsistency, and not its absence, that makes people attractive.
If powerful assholes don’t find you “arrogant,” it means you are doing something wrong.
People feel deep anxiety finding out that someone they thought was stupid is actually more intelligent than they are.
Life is about execution rather than purpose.
You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.
For life to be really fun, what you fear should line up with what you desire.
What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment.
Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others.
I need to keep reminding myself that a truly independent thinker may look like an accountant.
We are hunters; we are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.
The longest book I’ve ever read was 205 pages.
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.
Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
Your duty is to scream those truths that one should shout but that are merely whispered.
It takes a lot of skills to be virtuous without being boring.
To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.
For a free person, the optimal—most opportunistic—route between two points should never be the shortest one.
They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).
A philosopher uses logic without statistics, an economist uses statistics without logic, a physicist uses both.
Why do I have an obsessive Plato problem? Most people need to surpass their predecessors; Plato managed to surpass all his successors.
It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.
Risk takers never complain. They do.
The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.
The general principle of antifragility: it is much better to do things you cannot explain than explain things you cannot do.
