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

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

People who buy annuities, it turns out, live longer than people who don't, and not because the people who buy annuities are healthier to start with. The evidence suggests that an annuity's steady payout provides a little extra incentive to keep chugging along.

As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.