My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.

Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history

Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.

It is much harder to become independent if you are wealthy than to become wealthy if you are independent.

All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.

I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.