Don't trust, just verify.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.

Many of life's decisions are hard. What kind of career should you pursue? Does your ailing mother need to be put in a nursing home? You and your spouse already have two kids; should you have a third?such decisions are hard for a number of reasons. For one the stakes are high. There's also a great deal of uncertainty involved. Above all, decisions like these are rare, which means you don't get much practice making them. You've probably gotten good at buying groceries, since you do it so often, but buying your first house is another thing entirely.

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.

And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality