Pritesh

Cynicism is a completely reasonable defense against fraud and bullshit. The trouble with cynicism as a defense mechanism is that you can get so good at it that you inadvertently also defend yourself against anything good happening for you.

The appeal of learning through others is that it can be efficient. Books, mentors, case studies all compress years of experience into hours of consumption. But compression has a cost: it assumes a decoder. Without proper tacit knowledge, the message can lose meaning or, in some cases, be actively confused. In these cases, theory isn’t wrong, just... See more

The tradeoffs of making the world more efficient are too light to be felt until they’re too heavy to be broken.

And ultimately, fear will disguise itself as “not me” and “not now.” It might already be creeping in as you read this.

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. – A... See more

To do science, you don’t need to start with the dawn of all human knowledge and then work forward. You start with the current state of knowledge and go from there. Learning the history of science is helpful for shaping your intuitions and giving you perspective, but you don’t actually have to read Darwin, for example, to do evolutionary biology.

Experience is food for the brain.

Revolutionary thinkers are not, primarily, gatherers of facts but weavers of new intellectual structures.

“The beauty of curiosity and being present is that it allows you to turn the constellation of dots in your mind into paths you can access , and that’s a competitive advantage over other people.