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April 12 - May 5, 2020
It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.
The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane: everything else on your eyelids manipulates you with an ad.*
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill. I wonder if a lion (or a cannibal) would pay a high premium for free-range humans.
No author should be considered as having failed until he starts teaching others about writing.
Half of suckerhood is not realizing that what you don’t like might be loved by someone else (hence by you, later), and the reverse.
Many are so unoriginal they study history to find mistakes to repeat.
Corollary to Moore’s Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.
An academic cannot lose his tenure, but a businessman and risk taker, poor or rich, can go bankrupt. That is the infuriating inequality.
Journalists cannot grasp that what is interesting is not necessarily important; most cannot even grasp that what is sensational is not necessarily interesting.
The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.
Polemic is a lucrative form of entertainment, as the media can employ unpaid and fiercely motivated actors.
golden saddle on a sick horse makes the problem feel worse; pomp and slickness in form make absence of substance nauseating.
To understand “progress”: all places we call ugly are both man-made and modern (Newark), never natural or historical (Rome).
My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.
The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.
For soldiers, we use the term “mercenary,” but we absolve employees of responsibility with “everybody needs to make a living.”
General principle: the solutions (on balance) need to be simpler than the problems.
For the robust, an error is information; for the fragile, an error is an error.
Upon arriving at the hotel in Dubai, the businessman had a porter carry his luggage; I later saw him lifting free weights in the gym.
Those who violate a rule in a logically self-consistent system can only do well if they violate at least one additional logical rule.
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).
In a conflict, the middle ground is least likely to be correct.
The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine—and nonperishable—work within institutions.
To be a philosopher is to know through long walks, by reasoning, and reasoning only, a priori, what others can only potentially learn from their mistakes, crises, accidents, and bankruptcies—that is, a posteriori.
Conscious ignorance, if you can practice it, expands your world; it can make things infinite.
What makes us fragile is that institutions cannot have the same virtues (honor, truthfulness, courage, loyalty, tenacity) as individuals.
Anyone who likes meetings should be banned from attending meetings.
In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations.
Bring the good news in trickles, the bad news in lumps.
The classical man’s worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man’s worst fear is just death.
never trust a man who doesn’t have enemies.
You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer, and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.
“epistemic arrogance,” this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved—who
