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March 12 - March 25, 2018
Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.
The same mechanism of transferring risk also impedes learning.
One, the fool, takes risks he doesn’t understand, mistaking his own past luck for skills, the other, the crook, transfers risks to others.
By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid.
Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk
Now, even if regulations had a small net payoff for society, I would still prefer to be as free as possible, but assume my civil responsibility, face my fate, and pay the penalty if I harm others.
If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.
Mercury was the most multitasking, sort of put-together god, as he was the boss of commerce, abundance, messengers, the underworld, as well as the patron of thieves and brigands and, not surprisingly, luck.
The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse.
Kurt Gödel (the grandmaster of logical rigor)
Understanding how the subparts of the brain (say, neurons) work will never allow us to understand how the brain works.
Yaneer Bar-Yam has applied the failure of mean-field
Under the right market structure, a collection of idiots produces a well-functioning market.
Individuals don’t need to know where they are going; markets do.
“Never buy when you can rent the three Fs: what you Float, what you Fly, and what you…(that something else).”
Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you strong evidence of submission.
An employee is—by design—more valuable inside a firm than outside of it; that is, more valuable to the employer than the marketplace.
In the famous tale by Ahiqar, later picked up by Aesop (then again by La Fontaine), the dog boasts to the wolf all the contraptions of comfort and luxury he has, almost prompting the wolf to enlist. Until the wolf asks the dog about his collar and is terrified when he understands its use. “Of all your meals, I want nothing.” He ran away and is still running.
Freedom is never free.
What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.
(the backfitting story of sour grapes now known as cognitive dissonance).
life is sacrifice and risk taking,
True equality is equality in probability.
Simply consider that close to 80 or 85 percent of the cost of a tomato can be attributed to transportation, storage, and waste (unsold inventories), rather than the cost at the farmer level. So visibly our efforts should be on low-tech distribution.
if wealth is giving you fewer options instead of more (and more varied) options, you’re doing it wrong.
It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences.
Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.
If the “law of the jungle” means anything, it means collaboration for the most part, with a few perceptional distortions caused by our otherwise well-functioning risk-management intuitions. Even predators end up in some type of arrangement with their prey.
An illustration of the bias-variance tradeoff. Assume two people (sober) shooting at a target in, say, Texas. The left shooter has a bias, a systematic “error,” but on balance gets closer to the target than the right shooter, who has no systematic bias but a high variance. Typically, you cannot reduce one without increasing the other. When fragile, the strategy at the left is the best: maintain a distance from ruin, that is, from hitting a point in the periphery should it be dangerous. This schema explains why if you want to minimize the probability of the plane crashing, you may make mistakes
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Herb Simon, who pioneered artificial intelligence; the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer; and the mathematician, logician, and decision theorist Ken Binmore, who spent his life formulating the logical foundations of rationality.
How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.
“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything,”
