Excerpts
Last updated: June 28, 2023
The page consists of excerpts from readings and people alike that just hit home.
Albert Einstein
- As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.
Alberto Brandolini
- It’s the assumption of the developers that goes to production.
Andrew Huberman
- Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure.
- Indeed, dopamine lies at the heart of addiction to all things.
- Don’t spike dopamine prior to engaging in effort, and don’t spike dopamine after engaging in effort. Learn to spike dopamine from effort itself.
Anonymous
- It is not a justice system, it is a legal system.
- The man who loves walking will walk further than the man who loves the destination.
- Don't steal a candle to read the Bible.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to subtract.
Ben Patrick
- Change lives, business follows.
Bessel van der Kolk
- All trauma is preverbal.
- Trauma is when we are not seen and known.
Bryce Krawczyk
- You need to earn the right to have high expectations of yourself. Expectations have to be realistic—so you need to invest in the process and details of your training and recovery, before you get to expect big things from yourself.
C. J. Cherryh
- Your sword has no blade. It has only your intention. When that goes astray you have no weapon.
Carl Jung
- Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
Carl Sagan
- One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
Catherynne M. Valente
- ...the beginning is where the end gets born.
Deadmau5
- Source: There are more lawyers in Disney than animators.
Denzel Washington
- When you pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too.
Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
- An expected reward that fails to materialize is worse than a reward that was never anticipated in the first place.
Eliezer Yudkowsky (Rationality: From AI to Zombies)
- No matter how many days go by in blissful ignorance, it only takes a single mistake to undo a human life, to outweigh every penny you picked up from the railroad tracks of stupidity.
- Source: The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral.
- Rational thought produces beliefs which are themselves evidence.
- Mystery is a property of questions, not answers.
- It is far better to say “magic,” than “complexity” or “emergence”; the latter words create an illusion of understanding. Wiser to say “magic,” and leave yourself a placeholder, a reminder of work you will have to do later.
- There are some mental searches that we secretly wish would fail; and when the prospect of success is uncomfortable, people take the earliest possible excuse to give up.
- If you don’t have enough experience to regenerate beliefs when they are deleted, then do you have enough experience to connect that belief to anything at all?
- To be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors. To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.
- That which I cannot eliminate may be well worth reducing.
- So long as Lady Justice is investigating a single, strictly factual question, with a binary answer space, a set of scales would be an appropriate tool. If Justitia must consider any more complex issue, she should relinquish her scales or relinquish her sword.
- Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
- Your instinctive willingness to believe something will change along with your willingness to affiliate with people who are known for believing it—quite apart from whether the belief is actually true.
- In all human history, every great leap forward has been driven by a new clarity of thought. Except for a few natural catastrophes, every great woe has been driven by a stupidity. Our last enemy is ourselves; and this is a war, and we are soldiers.
- You cannot “rationalize” what is not already rational. It is as if “lying” were called “truthization.”
- Science has heroes, but no gods. The great Names are not our superiors, or even our rivals; they are passed milestones on our road. And the most important milestone is the hero yet to come.
- It is the resolution of doubts, not the mere act of doubting, which drives the ratchet of rationality forward.
Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson
- That’s the way it is now: You can’t find the heart of anything to stick the knife.
Elwyn Brooks White
- I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.
Eric Hoffer
- Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.
Feng Chen Wang
- Source: (On Deconstructing Stereotypes) A definition is just an arbitrary word. It doesn’t necessarily exist. I think definitions are just waiting to be shattered.
Take fashion for example. We often segment clothes by season or gender out of habit. That just begs to be deconstructed.
François-Marie Arouet
- Perfect is the enemy of good.
Friedrich Nietzche
- Madness is something rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.
- Whoever fights monsters should see to it, that in the process, he does not become a monster.
- But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself.
Gabor Maté
- Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you.
- Children, especially highly sensitive children, can be wounded in multiple ways: by bad things happening, yes, but also by good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met, or the experience of not being seen and accepted, even by loving parents.
- If, despite decades of evidence, “big-T trauma” has barely registered on the medical radar screen, small-t trauma does not even cause a blip.
- The usual conception of trauma conjures up notions of catastrophic events: hurricanes, abuse, egregious neglect, and war. This has the unintended and misleading effect of relegating trauma to the realm of the abnormal, the unusual, and the exceptional.
If there exists a class of people we call “traumatized”, that must mean that most of us are not. Here we miss the mark by a wide margin.
Trauma pervades our culture, from personal functioning through social relationships, parenting, education, popular culture, economics, and politics. In fact, someone without the marks of trauma would be an outlier in our society.
We are closer to the truth when we ask: Where do we each fit on the broad and surprisingly inclusive trauma spectrum? Which of its many marks has each of us carried all (or most) of our lives, and what have the impacts been? And what possibilities would open up were we to become more familiar, even intimate, with them?
- It is sobering to realize that who we take ourselves to be and the ways we habitually act, including many of our seeming “strengths”—the least and the most functional aspects of our “normal” selves—are often, in part, the wages of traumatic loss.
Hacker News
- Source: Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something. Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
Janina Vela
- Source: The retelling of the oppression of the Marcoses does not negate the oppression from any other political family.
The fight for #NeverAgain, #NeverForget is not about the condemnation of one family, nor the glorification of another. This is about the fight for the justice that Filipinos never got.
Jason Stoddard
- Don’t suck by pricing things at what the market will bear, rather than what is fair based on your cost of production.
Jayne Goheen
- You have to have darkness to see light. Often times we experience beauty because we can put that against recognizing ugliness.
Jerry Cleaver
- What does you in is not failure to apply some high-level, intricate, complicated technique. It’s overlooking the basics. Not keeping your eye on the ball.
John F. Kennedy
- The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
Karel Saquing
- Don’t learn more than you can actually apply.
- Good-looking people sometimes don’t know how or why they look good.
Keith Richards
- All the contortions we go through just not to be ourselves for a few hours.
Kevin Simler & Robin Hanson (The Elephant in the Brain)
- The deeper logic of many of our strangest and most unique behaviors may lie in their value as signals.
- Judge freely, and accept that you too will be judged.
- Just as camouflage is useful when facing an adversary with eyes, self-deception can be useful when facing an adversary with mind-reading powers.
- In general, we prefer explanations that make us look good, whether as individuals, families, communities, or nations. When it comes to our rivals, we’re perfectly happy to entertain unflattering theories about their behavior, as long as the mud we fling at them doesn’t spatter too much back at us.
Lord Acton
- Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Luke Muehlhauser
- You are not a Bayesian homunculus whose reasoning is “corrupted” by cognitive biases. You just are cognitive biases.
Malcolm Gladwell
- You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.
- ...we have built a world that systematically discriminates against a class of people who, through no fault of their own, violate our ridiculous ideas about transparency.
Marc Stiegler
- The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”
The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view . . .”
Mark Manson
- ...it is impossible to become someone new without first grieving the loss of who you used to be.
Michael Bennet & Sarah Bennet (F*ck Feelings)
- The only book that can actually teach you how to change how others think is a lobotomy manual.
- Most of us have weird brains, and those who appear not to just haven’t exposed their own brains to the kinds of stress, relatives, or Japanese animation that will reveal their mental dysfunction.
- You need to accept that life is hard and your frustrated efforts are a valuable guide to identifying what you can’t change.
Nibble Stew
- It’s not what programming languages do, it’s what they shepherd you to.
- Being right is easy. Being relevant is extremely difficult.
Oscar Wilde
- Everything in moderation, including moderation.
Pericles
- What I fear is not the enemy’s strategy, but our own mistakes.
Peter Attia
- These trials take heterogeneous inputs (the people in the study or studies) and come up with homogeneous results (the average result across all those people).
Peter Levine
- Conscious, explicit memory is only the proverbial tip of a very deep and mighty iceberg. It barely hints at the submerged strata of primal implicit experience that moves us in ways the conscious mind can only begin to imagine.
- Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood, and untreated cause of human suffering.
- Certainly, all traumatic events are stressful, but not all stressful events are traumatic.
Pooh-Bah, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado
- Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative . . .
Quentin Crisp
- Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.
- If there were no applause and no criticism, who would you be?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
- The years teach much which the days never know.
- Source: (On free food and shelter) We give these things to prisoners because they are considered basic human rights. Makes you wonder why we don’t provide them to everyone else.
- Source: You cannot pull yourself by the bootstrap if you do not have any fucking boots
Rollo Tomassi
- ...behavior is the only reliable evidence of motivation.
Robert Greene
- To waste your time in battles not of your choosing is more than just a mistake, it is stupidity of the highest order.
Robert Wright
- The human species is the human predicament.
Robin Hanson
- You are never entitled to your opinion. Ever! You are not even entitled to “I don’t know.” You are entitled to your desires, and sometimes to your choices. You might own a choice, and if you can choose your preferences, you may have the right to do so. But your beliefs are not about you; beliefs are about the world. Your beliefs should be your best available estimate of the way things are; anything else is a lie.
Rommel MARTINEZ
- News is never a source of knowledge—it’s sweets for the mind.
Rumi
- You think that because you understand “one” that you must therefore understand “two” because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand “and.”
Samuel Smiles
- A man can achieve almost anything by the exercise of his own free powers of action and self-denial. But he must be ever armed against the temptation of low indulgences, and must not defile his body by sensuality, nor his mind by servile thoughts.
Scientific Principles of Strength Training
- Because specificity and variation are in many ways mirror-images of each other, over-applications of specificity may be under-applications of variation and vice-versa.
Scott
- (On COVID) It’s the first time in my life that I had more alcohol on me than in me.
Scott Adams
- If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won’t necessarily understand why it worked.
Sheryl Sandberg
- If you’re offered a seat on a rocket, don't ask what seat. Just get on.
Stefan Zweig
- Darkness must fall before we are aware of the majesty of the stars above our heads.
Sun Tzu
- Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
Susan Plummer (The Equalizer)
- Sometimes, we make the wrong choices to get to the right place.
Teddy Baldassarre
- Source: There’s minimalism as a pursuit, and then there’s minimalism as a way of absence of thought, so it’s not intended minimalism, it’s just minimalism based on the fact that there is no thought going into the design...
- Source: The world lies to you all the time, I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to lie to yourself...
The I Ching
- Chaos—where brilliant dreams are born.
The Molecule of More
- Violence can give us domination, but to be successful, it must come from the cold circuits of control dopamine.
Tom Scott
- Source: Entropy will get us all in the end.
VigorousSteve
- Source: [On Passive Incomes] ...the only real passive income that exists is being born to very wealthy parents, where you already got your unlimited credit cards when you were still in the cradle, and even then, you still have to pretend or at least try to love them so that income stream stays the same, because the last thing you want is to fuck up when your parents are very very rich, and then they cut off the tap and now you’ve developed no skills, and you can’t really do anything and then you have to go off the deep end...
Walter Kotschnig
- Let us keep our minds open, by all means... But don’t keep your minds so open that your brains fall out!
William Plomer
- Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.
Wittgenstein
- A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.
