Skin in the Game

People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.

Evidence of submission is displayed by the employee’s going through years depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, his ritualistic and punctual arrival at an office, his denying himself his own schedule, and his not having beaten up anyone on the way back home after a bad day. He is an obedient, housebroken dog.

If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.

What we saw worldwide from 2014 to 2018, from India to the U.K. to the U.S., was a rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy League, Oxford-Cambridge or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think, and… 5) whom to vote for.

Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.

The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.

Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park.

[I]n academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world, there is.

Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.

[I]t is about distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price for your mistakes. ...If you give an opinion and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences.

[N]ever engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.

In case you are giving economic views: Don't tell me what you "think," just tell me what's in your portfolio.

Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.

You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.