Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

So record rain directly led to record fires. There’s a long history of this, verified by looking at tree rings, which inscribe both heavy rainfall and subsequent fire scars. The two go hand in hand. “A wet year reduces fires while increasing vegetation growth, but then the increased vegetation dries out in subsequent dry years, thereby increasing t

The idea that incredible things happen because of boring statistics is important, because it’s true for terrible things too.

With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is apt to happen,” Mosteller said.

Two, realize that if you’re only preparing for the risks you can envision, you’ll be unprepared for the risks you can’t see every single time. So, in personal finance, the right amount of savings is when it feels like it’s a little too much. It should feel excessive; it should make you wince a little. The same goes for how much debt you think you s

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt says people don’t really communicate on social media so much as they perform for one another.

Are stocks overvalued? What is bitcoin worth? How high can Tesla go? You can’t answer those questions with a formula. They’re driven by whatever someone else is willing to pay for them in any given moment—how they feel, what they want to believe, and how persuasive the storytellers are. And the stories change all the time. They can’t be predicted a

After slapping Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars, Will Smith turned to Denzel Washington for advice. Washington said, “At your highest moment, be careful. That’s when the devil comes for you.”

Or take the stock market. The valuation of every company is simply a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.

The decline of local news has all kinds of implications. One that doesn’t get much attention is that the wider the news becomes the more likely it is to be pessimistic. Two things make that so: • Bad news gets more attention than good news because pessimism is seductive and feels more urgent than optimism. • The odds of a bad news story—a fraud, a

The first step toward accepting that some things don’t compute is realizing that the reason we have innovation and advancement is because we are fortunate to have people in this world whose minds work differently from ours.