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December 16 - December 22, 2017
Never buy a product that the owner of the company that makes it doesn’t use, or, in the case of, say, medication, wouldn’t contingently use.
For soldiers, we use the term “mercenary,” but we absolve employees of responsibility with “everybody needs to make a living.” I am rather fed up with
English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).
It takes a lot of skills to be virtuous without being boring.
ROBUSTNESS AND ANTIFRAGILITY
You are only secure if you can lose your fortune without the additional worse insult of having to become humble.*
To test someone’s robustness to reputational errors, ask a man in front of an audience if he is “still doing poorly” or if he is “still losing money” and watch his reaction.
Robustness is progress without impatience. When conflicted between two choices, take neither.
Nation-states like war; city-states like commerce; families like stability; and individuals like entertainment.
The problem with the idea of “learning from one’s mistakes” is that most of what people call mistakes aren’t mistakes.
Robust is when you care more about the few who like your work than the multitude who dislike it (artists); fragile when you care more about the few who dislike your work than the multitude who like it (politicians).
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Failure-resistant is achievable; failure-free is not.
Academics are only useful when they try to be useless (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and dangerous when they try to be useful.
For the robust, an error is information; for the fragile, an error is an error.
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The main disadvantage of being a writer, particularly in Britain, is that there is nothing you can do in public or private that would damage your reputation.
The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it.
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You can expect blowups and explosive errors in fields where there is a penalty for simplicity.
Increasingly, people don’t become academics because of intelligence, but rather because of a lower grasp of disorder.
How often have you arrived one, three, or six hours late on a transatlantic flight as opposed to one, three, or six hours early? This explains why deficits tend to be larger, rarely smaller, than planned.
THE LUDIC FALLACY AND DOMAIN DEPENDENCE*1
I recently had a meal in a fancy restaurant with complicated dishes with fancy names ($125 per person), then enjoyed a pizza afterward, straight out of the oven, $7.95. I wonder why the pizza isn’t twenty times the price of the complicated dish, since I’d rather have the former—at any price—over the latter.
When you beat up someone physically, you get exercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.
Just as eating cow meat doesn’t turn you into a cow, studying philosophy doesn’t make you wiser.
They agree that chess training only improves chess skills but disagree that classroom training (almost) only improves classroom skills.
People like to eat fish by the water even if the fish was caught far away and transported by trucks.
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.
Games were created to give nonheroes the illusion of winning. In real life, you don’t know who really won or lost (except too late), but you can tell who is heroic and who is not.
I suspect that IQ, SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent.*2
They read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall on an eReader but refuse to drink Château Lynch-Bages in a Styrofoam cup.
Most can’t figure out why one can like rigorous knowledge and despise academics, yet they understand that one can like food and hate canned tuna.
My best example of the domain dependence of our minds, from my recent visit to Paris: at lunch in a French restaurant, my friends ate the salmon and threw away the skin; at dinner, at a sushi bar, the very same friends ate the skin and threw away the salmon.
Fragility: we have been progressively separating human courage from warfare, allowing wimps with computer skills to kill people without the slightest risk to their lives.
Those who can’t do shouldn’t teach.
EPISTEMOLOGY AND SUBTRACTIVE KNOWLEDGE
The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds.
The perfect sucker understands that pigs can stare at pearls but doesn’t realize he can be in an analog situation.
Those who violate a rule in a logically
self-consistent system can only do well if they violate at least one additional logical rule. 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).
In a conflict, the middle ground is least likely to be correct.
Happiness: we don’t know what it means, how to measure it, or how to reach it, but we know extremely well how to avoid unhappiness.
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In the medical and social domains, treatment should never be equivalent to silencing symptoms.
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The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination.
THE SCANDAL OF PREDICTION A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.
The ancients knew very well that the only way to understand events was to cause them.
Anyone voicing a forecast or expressing an opinion without something at risk has some element of phoniness. Unless he risks going down with the ship this would be like watching an adventure movie.
For Seneca, the Stoic sage should withdraw from public efforts when unheeded and the state is corrupt beyond repair. It is wiser to wait for self-destruction.
BEING A PHILOSOPHER AND MANAGING TO REMAIN ONE
To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.
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