There are systems that use failure as fuel for improvement, where the cost of failure is small.

You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system.

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.

Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice.

I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse