Thought provoking

There are things in life where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest.

Systems don’t have motivations, so they don’t have hidden motivations. If the system consistently produces a particular outcome, then that’s its purpose. But on the other hand, systems don’t make mistakes. Just as it’s impossible to get lost if you don’t know where you’re going, a decision-making system does what it does and then either lives with

When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything wi

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system

Douglas W. Hubbard

Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of the Ogilvy advertising agency, famously told a story about an office building where people complained that an elevator took too long to arrive. Instead of spending $1 million to make the elevators 5 percent faster, they solved the problem by spending around $100 to add mirrors so people could look at themselves whi