Competition never stops. A species that gains an advantage over a competitor instantly incentivizes the competitor to improve. It’s an arms race. Evolution is the study of advantages. Van Valen’s idea is simply that there are no permanent advantages. Everyone is madly scrambling all the time, but no one gets so far ahead that they become extinction

If you have the right answer and you’re a good storyteller, you’ll almost certainly get ahead. That’s always been true, always will be true, and it shows up in so many areas of history.

Militaries are engines of innovation because they occasionally deal with problems so important—so urgent, so vital—that money and manpower are removed as obstacles, and those involved collaborate in ways that are hard to emulate during calm times.

It is so easy to discount how much progress is achievable.

Author Robert Greene once wrote, “The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.”

Bezos once said, “The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it.”

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

“For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form,” Haldane wrote. A most convenient size. A proper state where things work well but break when you try to scale them to a different size or speed.

Neither country would start a war with a big bomb. But would they launch a small one? Probably. And would a small bomb justify retaliating with a big one? Yes. So the small bombs increased the odds of the big bombs being used. Small risks weren’t the alternative to big risks; they were the trigger.