There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)

When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.

Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.

But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.

When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.