Thaddeus

“The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“be. So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“In the effort to understand, we may go too far in personalizing institutions, and even entire industries; we may forget that none of these things really exist. It is only individual human beings who have agendas—and these agendas are themselves complex expressions of political and personal drives, some unconscious. So long as institutions must be comprised of individuals, then, institutions will have fractures, gradients; they will be many things, and in combinations that will change over time. We speak and think in models. And so we say that “The New York Times” wants to accomplish this, or that “the CIA” is after that. So long as we recognize this as shorthand, necessary”
― Barrett Brown, My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir

“Ecotone. It means an in-between spot. Eco, like ecosystem. And tone, from tonos. That’s Greek. It means ‘tension.’ So it’s like the tension between ecosystems, you understand? The overlap between two worlds. Two worlds in conflict with each other. You see all that land behind us?” He pointed a thumb back at the soft rolling grassy hills. “That land wants to be prairie. But this here land in front of us, it wants to be forest. And this spot, this is where the prairie and the forest are fighting. And this little guy”—he brushed the baby elm gently with a finger—“he’s the advance guard. There’s a slow-motion war happening right here, Jack, beneath our feet, on a scale we can’t even imagine.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness