1. People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide.
2. Erudition without bullshit, intellect without cowardice, courage without imprudence, mathematics
without nerdiness, scholarship without academia, intelligence without shrewdness, religiosity without
intolerance, elegance without softness, sociality without dependence, enjoyment without addiction, religion without tolerance, and, above all, nothing without skin in the game.
3. A government stating "we will not stand idle in front of atrocities committed by (foreign dictator) XYZ" is typically trying to mitigate the guilt for standing idle in front of more atrocities committed by said XYZ.
4. Almost all those caught making a logical fallacy interpret it as a "disagreement".
5. France took Algeria, hoping for a country to eat cassoulet and instead France is now eating couscous.
6. If powerful assholes don't find you "arrogant", it means you are doing something wrong.
7. If someone is making an effort to ignore you, he is not ignoring you.
8. In your prayers substitute "protect us from evil"with "protect us from those who improve things for a salary".
9. Most mistakes get worse when you try to correct them.
10. Much of the difference between what is work and what is leisure is branding
11. Never read a book review written by an author whose books you wouldn't read.
12. One of life's machinations is to make some people both rich and unhappy, that is, jointly fragile and deprived of hope.
13. People don't like it when you ask them for help; they also feel left out when you don't ask them for help.
14. Sometimes people ask you a question with their eyes begging you to not tell them the truth.
15. The dream of having computers behave like humans is coming true, with the transformation, in a
single generation, of humans into computers.
16. The first one who uses "but", has lost the argument.
17. The main reason to go to school is to learn *how not* to think like a professor.
18. The modern hypocrite gives the designation "respect" to what is nothing but fear of the powerful.
19. We tend to define "rude" less by the words used (what is said) than by the status of the recipient (to whom it is addressed).
20. When someone writes "I dislike you but I agree with you", I read "I dislike you because I agree with you."
21.It is a very powerful manipulation to let others win the small battles.
22.People feel deep anxiety finding out that someone they held for stupid is actually more intelligent than they are.
23. Automation makes otherwise pleasant activities turn into "work".
24. For life to be really fun, what you fear should line up with what you desire.
25. If you get easily bored, it means that your BS detector is functioning properly; if you forget (some) things, it means that your mind knows how to filter; and if you feel sadness, it means that you are human.
26. It is not possible to have fun when you try.
27. Life is about execution rather than purpose.
28. The good life -the vita beata - is like reading a Russian novel: it takes 200 pages of struggling with the characters before one can start enjoying things. Then the agitation starts to make sense.
29. The ultimate freedom lies in not having to explain "why" you did something.
30. Thinking that all individuals pursue "selfish" interest is equivalent to assuming that all random
variables have zero covariance.
31. We need to feel a little bit lost somewhere, physically or intellectually, at least once a day.
32. Atheists are just modern versions of religious fundamentalists: they both take religion too literally.
33. Monotheistic religion isn't so much about telling man that there is one God, so much preventing man from thinking that he is God.
34. Paganism is decentralized theology.
35. The ancient Mediterranean : before monotheism, people changed and exchanged rites and gods as we do with ethnic food.
36. For an honest man, freedom requires having no friends; and, one step above, sainthood requires having no family.
37. Never hire an A student unless it is to take exams.
38. Business wars are typically lost by both parties, academic wars are won by both sides.
39. Corollary: If you socialize with someone with a smaller bank account than yours, you are obligated to converse exactly as if you had the same means, eat in the places where he eats, at no point in time show the pictures of your vacation in Provence or anything that
hints at the differential in means.
40. Did you notice that collecting art is to hobbypainting as watching pornography is to doing the real
thing? Only difference is status.
41. Do not socialize with people much richer than you; but if you do, do it in your own territory
(restaurants you can afford, wine, etc.)
42. I wonder how many people would seek excessive wealth if it did not carry a measure of status with it.
43. In the days of Suetonius, 60% of prominent educators (grammarians) were slaves. Today the ratio
is 97.1%, and growing.
44. It is good to not feel envy; but better to neither envy nor be envied.
45. Success in all endeavors is requires absence of specific qualities. 1) To succeed in crime requires
absence of empathy, 2) To succeed in banking you need absence of shame at hiding risks, 3) To succeed in school requires absence of common sense, 4) To succeed in economics requires absence of understanding of probability, risk, or 2nd order effects and about anything, 5) To succeed in journalism requires inability to think about matters that have an infinitesimal small chance of being relevant next January, ...6) But to succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.
46. The alpha person at a gathering of "high status" persons is often, detectably, the waiter.
47. The natural benefit of a cell phone, laptop, and other indispensable modern items is the joy one gets finding the object after losing it. Lose your wallet full of credit cards and you will have a chance to have a great day.
48. There is no clearer sign of failure than when of a middle-aged man boasting of his performance in
college.
49. What we commonly call "success" (rewards, status, recognition, some new metric) is a consolation prize for those both unhappy and not good at what they do.
50. You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references "money" in his
conversation.
51. You will never know for sure if someone is an asshole until he becomes rich.
52. Studying the work and intellectual habits of a "genius" to learn from him is like studying the garb of a chef to emulate his cooking.
53.To figure out how well you will do 10 years from now relative to someone else, count your enemies, count his, and square the ratio.
54. All rumors about a public figure are to be deemed untrue until he threatens to sue.
55. Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and
the risks of the decision.
56. Executive programs allow us to watch people who have never worked lecturing those who have never pondered.
57. Never get into a business partnership with a retired lawyer unless he has another hobby.
58. Never show a risk number, even if it is right.
59. People tend to whisper when they say the truth and raise their voice when they lie.
60. The problem with academics is that they really think that nonacademics find them more intelligent than themselves.
61. The rational heuristic is to avoid any market commentary from anyone who has to work for a living. [DUPL?]
62. Under opacity, incomplete information, and partial understanding, much of what we don't
understand is labeled "irrational".
63. Universities have been progressing from providing scholarship for a small fee into selling degrees
at a large cost.
64. When people say "I am investing for the long term", it means they are losing money.
65. The fact that people in countries with cold weather tend to be harder working, richer, less relaxed,
less amicable, less tolerant of idleness, more (over)organized and more harried than those in hotter
climates should make us wonder whether wealth is mere indemnification, and motivation is just
overcompensation, for not having a real life.
66. A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading.
67. A heuristic on whether you have control of your life: can you take naps?
68. Fasting: every human should learn to read, write, respect the weak, take risks in voicing disrespect for the powerful when warranted, and fast.
69. High Modernity: routine in place of physical effort, physical effort in place of mental expenditure, and mental expenditure in place of mental clarity.
70. In real life exams someone gives you an answer and you have to find the best corresponding questions.
71. It used to take 7 years to figure out if a book is a book or journalism between covers. Now all one
needs is wait two years. Soon, a few months.
72. Life is about early detection of the reversal point beyond which your own belongings (say a house, country house, car, or business) start owning you.
73. One of the shortest books I've ever read had 745 pages.
74. Real life (vita beata) is when your choices correspond to your duties.
75. Some ideas are born as you write then down, others become dead.
76. The longest book I've ever read was 205 pages.
77. Formal education is credentials plus negative knowledge so it sort of works out on balance.
78. I fail to see the difference between extreme wealth and overdose.
79. It is a curse to have ideas that people understand only when it is too late.
80.The most important aspect of fasting is that you feel deep undirected gratitude when you break the fast.
81. A risk you run when you write a book calling journalists BS vendors is that all your reviewers will be BS vendors.
82. 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.
83. Authors deplete their soul when the marginal contribution of a new book is smaller than that of the previous one.
84. I want to write books that only those who read them claim they did.
85. I was told to write medium sized books. Yet of the two most successful French novels in history: one is very short (Le Petit Prince, 80 p), other extra long (Proust's Recherche, 3200 p), following the statistical Arcsine law.
86. I wonder why newssuckers don't realize that if news had the slightest predictive & nonanecdotal value journalists would be monstrously rich. And if journalists were really not interested in money they would be writing literary essays.
87. If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don't attend. People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity… or get another job.
88. If you don't feel that you haven't read enough, you haven't read enough.
89. 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.
90. Remove all empty words from writings, resume, conversation, except when they aim at courtesy.
91.God created Monte Carlo and similar places so extremely rich people would come experience extreme envy.
92. A hotshot is someone temporarily perceived to be of some importance, rather than perceived to be of some temporary importance.
93.An academic (say Krugman or Piketty) cannot lose his tenure, but a businessman and risk-taker, poor or rich can go bankrupt. That is the infuriating inequality.
94. If a pilot crashes a plane, N=1 is not anecdote, if he doesn't crash the plane, N=100 is anecdote.
95. It is very difficult to argue with salaried people that the simple can be important and the important can be simple.
96 Never rid anyone of an illusion unless you can replace it in his mind with another illusion.
97. Polemic is a lucrative form of entertainment, as the media can employ unpaid and fiercely motivated actors.
98. Probability is the intersection of the most rigorous mathematics and the messiest of life.
99. To rephrase, every human should at all times have equality in probability (which we can control), not equality in outcome.
100. Just as statisticians understand the risks of roulette sequences better than carpenters, probabilists
understand systemic ecological risks better than biologists.
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