Intelligence

Schools are good at teaching and measuring intelligence, so that’s what people tend to value and aspire to. But in almost any field, smarts is what gets rewarded long term.

You cannot measure empathy like you can SAT scores, so it’s not surprising that one is given more weight on resumes. But who is more likely to succeed in life – a person whose... See more

Sometimes I’ve had this feeling like someone is so much smarter than me and therefore I have no hope of competing. But usually what is really going on is that they are just more obsessed than me. Intelligence is good, and some amount is required, but the obsession is better.

Intelligent people simply aren’t willing to accept answers that they don’t understand — no matter how many other people try to convince them of it, or how many other people believe it, if they aren’t able to convince them selves of it, they won’t accept it.

The project would attempt to invent an anti-gravity system from the ground up instead of reverse engineering it. This project began in 1955 with the establishment of the Research Institute for Advanced Studies (RIAS) at the Glenn L. Martin Company, which later became Martin-Marietta and ultimately merged with Lockheed in 1995 to form the modern... See more

In late 1970, Lockheed was near bankruptcy because of the large debt they had built up to fund the L-1011 Tristar commercial aircraft program. They approached the Nixon administration for a $250 million loan guarantee to avoid insolvency. That is about $1.9 billion in today’s dollars. Here was an opportunity to transfer the assets to a private... See more

Intelligence without risk is an empty thought, as is an intelligence whose realization takes no time. Risk and time are the presuppositions for the history of intelligence in which nothing is given in advance and nothing is completed as the totality of that history.