Change is like life getting translated into a new language. The past turns into a story written in a new language that you can only remember and read in the new way now.
Jokes are a way to beta test dangerous ideas.
Show me a completely smooth operation and I’ll show you someone who’s covering mistakes. Real boats rock.
Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it
Max Planck
is that a single person (or even a single action) will come to save the world, fix society, improve the economy, rescue the company…
“When Simonides or someone offered to teach him the art of memory,” the Athenian politician Themistocles replied that he would “prefer the art of forgetting. ‘For I remember,’ said he, ‘even things I do not wish to remember, but I cannot forget things I wish to forget” – Cicero
WITTGENSTEIN-SOROS MEMORYLESSNESS
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) February 7, 2022
Waissman found difficulties working with Wittgenstein because he had "the gift of seeing everything as if for the first time".
Soros claimed he was helped by a bad memory so he couldn't remember past opinions & could not be married to them. (FBR)
At the moment of victory, tighten the straps of your helmet
Tokugawa Ieyasu
I came up with this long ago – each needs different skills/hats:
— Mike Sellers – always working on N+1 projects (@onlinealchemist) September 17, 2020
An idea is not a design
A design is not a prototype
A prototype is not a program
A program is not a product
A product is not a business
A business is not profits
Profits are not an exit
And an exit is not happiness
This is the classical problem of naive optimization. You optimize on one dimension, causing hidden side effects in other dimensions.
4) To be a well functioning human being you must be at once a:
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) January 10, 2022
+ mediocre runner
+ mediocre weightlifter
+ mediocre hiker/mountaineer
+ mediocre skier[or]/tennis[or]/… player
+ mediocre chess/bridge[or]/ player
+ mediocre [name martial art]
+ mediocre winetaster/squidinkist…
you are always you.
sometimes double-negatives can be very helpful
— visa is doing final edits (92%) ✍🏾📖 (@visakanv) December 12, 2021
"be yourself" can be endlessly frustrating, but "be not not-yourself" is IMO a much more useful directive
You can only measure negative (and positive) externalities
The most magnetic kind of intelligent person makes 𝑦𝑜𝑢 feel smarter when they explain something.
That’s my advice.
As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.
