We underestimate the distance between ourselves and others. Not just inferential distance, but distances of temperament and ability, distances of situation and resource, distances of unspoken knowledge and unnoticed skills and luck, distances of interior landscape.

If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.

By and large, the answer to the question "How do large institutions survive?" is "They don't!" The vast majority of large modern-day institutions - some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization - simply fail to exist in the first place.

I ask the fundamental question of rationality: Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?

Okay, so either (a) I just teleported somewhere else entirely (b) they can fold space like no one's business or (c) they are simply ignoring all the rules.

After all, if you had the complete decision process, you could run it as an AI, and I'd be coding it up right now.

There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model.