The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.

An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile.

I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.

Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.

Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.

When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness.

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.