∞ I often feel the need to appear masterful in relative proportion to my fears and insecurities. This can result in a strange effect: my actual expressions of terror and desperation take on the aspect of projected expertise.

The more intelligent you are, the more you consider what can go wrong. This awareness often leads to inaction. This is why sharp intellect must be married to wicked resolve and indomitable courage to be most effective.

The mind frees up RAM by attributing phenomena to as few causes as possible. This is 1 reason we’re attuned to stories: a story is a sequence of events in which each event has but 1 cause. Resist the urge to fictionalise reality by remembering causation is not a thread but a web.

The things you give your attention to are shaping you, even if you are only reacting against them. They are modulating your mood and filling your head with fantasy scenarios. Pay attention to what you're paying attention to. Become conscious of your focus and guide it.

If people find you are easily offended, they will typically conceal their true, potentially offensive sentiments, and present you with an anodyne counterfeit of themselves. Taking offence is therefore, by proxy, an act of self-deception.

Wow! "Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and random motion." sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/presentations/…

If people believe comforting lies over disturbing truths, why do conspiracy theorists believe disturbing lies? Because the idea of sinister elites controlling everything, whilst scary, is still more comforting than the truth: that no one is in control and everyone is an idiot.

Emotions are easily hijacked by illusory threats that tap into our insecurities. We can’t be strategically dynamic if we are always on the defensive. We are more effective when we realize how many things don’t require any response at all.

Twitter is dominated by reactions to other reactions. Whatever the event, political tribes affirm their identity by attacking a poor response from some arbitrarily chosen member of an opposing tribe. Random accounts with bad takes become strawman symbols of the hated other.

Conflict between Men and Women emerges for reasons similar to those driving conflict between nations, absent trade: Under balanced asymmetric advantage, trade emerges as a reciprocally stabilizing flow. To the extent we obsolete said asymmetries, direct conflict re-emerges.

The best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. They are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets.

The most insidious form of deception is not lying but selective emphasis. A single fact omitted from an article, or inserted into its headline, can warp one’s perceptions as profoundly as any falsehood. Except this form of mistruth also passes fact checks.

The intellectual, Like the scientist, Is immune to Wisdom. For wisdom does not bow to their rules.

It becomes a lot easier to forgive people when you remember that they’re genetically ~99% chimpanzee.

We have to get the word back but it is the right term, and there is no real substitute. aier.org/article/how-wo… aier.org/article/how-wo…

Opportunity lies in the degree to which one develops the capacity to align their highly constrained free will with a situation in which potential stands to conquer inertia.

A thing I learned from Dr Jordan B Peterson: a deeper mythic axis than good vs. evil is: known vs unknown. While many are motivated to fight for change via a good vs evil framing of their venture, might even stronger passions be tapped via a known vs unknown framing?

Regret minimization is a great framework because it puts your future self in charge, and he/she is who is going to live with the consequences of your present actions.

Let’s say you’re lost in the woods. Who’s more dangerous? The person who suggests the group pause and perhaps retrace a few steps. Or The supremely confident person who tells everyone they know exactly where to go. This is why I critique the new left more than the old right.

"people on both sides indicated that they anticipated that hearing from the other side would induce cognitive dissonance (e.g., require effort, cause frustration) and undermine a sense of shared reality with the person expressing disparate views (e.g., damage the relationship)."