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November 9 - November 14, 2021
An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than in what you are trying to hide.
The test of originality for an idea is not the absence of one single predecessor but the presence of multiple but incompatible ones.
If you want strangers to help you, smile. For those close to you, cry.
Life is about execution rather than purpose.
Religion isn’t so much about telling man that there is one God as about preventing man from thinking that he is God.
You can replace lies with truth; but myth is only displaced with a narrative.
Atheists are just modern versions of religious fundamentalists: both take religion too literally.
Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision.
In summary, modernity replaced process with result and the relational with the transactional.
What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism.
You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.
We are better at (involuntarily) doing out of the box than (voluntarily) thinking out of the box.
Your silence is only informational if you can speak skillfully.
Nation-states like war; city-states like commerce; families like stability; and individuals like entertainment.
Change your anchor to what did not happen rather than what did happen.
It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.
Knowledge is subtractive, not additive—what we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do).
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).
The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination.
Real mathematicians understand completeness, real philosophers understand incompleteness, the rest don’t formally understand anything.
A philosopher uses logic without statistics, an economist uses statistics without logic, a physicist uses both.
Conscious ignorance, if you can practice it, expands your world; it can make things infinite.
What they call “risk” I call opportunity; but what they call “low risk” opportunity I call sucker problem.
What makes us fragile is that institutions cannot have the same virtues (honor, truthfulness, courage, loyalty, tenacity) as individuals.
Bring the good news in trickles, the bad news in lumps.
Virtue is a sequence of small acts of omission. Honor and grandeur can be a single gutsy, momentous, and self-sacrificial act of commission.
The general principle of antifragility: it is much better to do things you cannot explain than explain things you cannot do.
Love without sacrifice is like theft.
When people call you intelligent it is almost always because they agree with you. Otherwise they just call you arrogant.
