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December 16 - December 22, 2017
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.
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No author should be considered as having failed until he starts teaching others about writing.
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.
A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
A writer told me, “I didn’t get anything done today.” Answer: try to do nothing. The best way to have only good days is to not aim at getting anything done. Actually almost everything I’ve written that has survived was written when I didn’t try to get anything done. Just as there are authors who enjoy having written and others who enjoy writing, there are books you enjoy reading and others you enjoy having read. A genius is someone with flaws harder to imitate than his qualities. With regular books, read the text and skip the footnotes; with those written by academics, read the footnotes and
skip the text; and with business books, skip both the text and the footnotes.
Double a man’s erudition; you will halve his citations. Authors deplete their soul when the marginal contribution of a new book is smaller than that of the previous one.
Losers, when commenting on the works of someone patently more impressive, feel obligated to unnecessarily bring down their subject by expressing what he is not (“he is not a genius, but…”; “while he is no Leonardo…”) instead of expressing what he is.
You are alive in inverse proportion to the density of clichés in your writing.
What we call “business books” is an eliminative category invented by bookstores for writings that have no depth, no style, no empirical rigor, and no linguistic sophistication.
Just like poets and artists, bureaucrats are born, not made; it takes normal humans extraordinary effort to keep attention on such boring tasks.
Mathematicians think in symbols, physicists in objects, philosophers in concepts, geometers in images, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators, writers in impressions, and idiots in words.
😆😆😆😆😆🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙 the way we see things
The costs of specialization: architects build to impress other architects; models are thin to impress other models; academics write to impress other academics; filmmakers try to impress other filmmakers; painters impress art dealers; but authors who write to impress book editors tend to fail.
It is a waste of emotions to answer critics; better to stay in print long after they are dead.
I can predict when an author is about to plagiarize me, and poorly so when he writes that Taleb “popularized” the theory of Black Swan events.* Newspaper readers exposed to real prose are like deaf persons at a Puccini opera: they may like a thing or two while wondering, “what’s the point?” Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry); some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.
The exponential information age is like a verbally incontinent person: he talks more and more as fewer and fewer people listen.
It’s much harder to write a book review for a book you’ve read than for a book you haven’t read.
Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some
day, find something to say.
Today, we mostly face the choice between those who write clearly about a subject they don’t understand and those who write poorly about a subject they don’t understand.
The information-rich Dark Ages: in 2010, 600,000 books were published, just in English, with few memorable quotes. Circa AD zero, a handful of books were written. In spite of the few that survived, there are loads of quotes.
In the past, most were ignorant, one in a thousand were refined enough to talk to. Today, literacy is higher, but thanks to progress, the media, and finance, only one in ten thousand.
We are better at (involuntarily) doing out of the box than (voluntarily) thinking out of the box.
I want to write books that only those who read them claim they did.
It is much less dangerous to think like a man of action than to act like a man of thought.
In any subject, if you don’t feel that you don’t know enough, you don’t know enough.
THE UNIVERSAL AND THE PARTICULAR
What I learned on my own I still remember. Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.
To grasp the difference between Universal and Particular, consider that some dress better to impress a single, specific person than an entire crowd.
We unwittingly amplify commonalities with friends, dissimilarities with strangers, and contrasts with enemies.
Many are so unoriginal they study history to find mistakes to repeat.
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There is nothing deemed harmful (in general) that cannot be beneficial in
some particular instances, and nothing deemed beneficial that cannot harm you in some circumstances. The more complex the system, the weaker the notion of Universal.
The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; some do both; and the wise does neither.
FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS
It is very difficult to argue with salaried people that the simple can be important and the important can be simple.
Corollary to Moore’s Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.*1
A hotshot is someone temporarily perceived to be of some importance, rather than perceived to be of some temporary importance.
God created Monte Carlo and similar places so extremely rich people would come experience extreme envy.
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The tragedy is that much of what you think is random is in your control and, what’s worse, the opposite.
The fool views himself as more unique and others more generic; the wise views himself as more generic and others more unique.
An academic cannot lose his tenure, but a businessman and risk taker, poor or rich, can go bankrupt. That is the infuriating inequality.
The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.
Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.*3 Probability is the intersection of the most rigorous mathematics and the messiest of life.
Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people’s heads.
NT just what you put into your minds but also what you remov.
Polemic is a lucrative form of entertainment, as the media can employ unpaid and fiercely motivated actors.
AESTHETICS Art is a one-sided conversation with the unobserved.
Beauty is enhanced by unashamed irregularities; magnificence by a façade of blunder.
To understand “progress”: all places we call ugly are both man-made and modern (Newark), never natural or historical (Rome). We love imperfection, the right kind of imperfection; we pay up for original art and typo-laden first editions.
Your silence is only informational if you can speak skillfully.
