“Science isn’t some objective reasonable force outside of politics. Scientists spend most of their careers chasing government grant funding, and fighting for appointments and promotions in government-funded university systems. Science follows politics, and nobody knows this as much as the disingenuous politicians who claim that their policies are subordinate to scientific findings.”
“For Vaughn, every language is really a story about the people it connected him to.
“He learned American Sign Language from Gallaudet University students at a club called Tracks, which had a dance floor known for its vibrations.
“He picked up some Japanese. from the staff at a restaurant where he volunteered to clean the fish tank once a week.
“When his niece liked the way the word chicken sounded in Salish., they started studying it together, befriended leaders of the language school on the Flathead Indian Reservation and road-tripped to Arlee, Mont., twice.”
Source: "The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages," The Washington Post, 4/5/2022
“You should, in science, believe logic and arguments, carefully drawn, and not authorities.”
- Richard Feynman
(HT: Shane Parrish of Farnam Street)
“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”
- Carl Sagan
Another rebuke of the idea that there is such a thing as 'settled science.' More rebukes here.
“One bit of advice: It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree. Make sure you understand the fundamental principles — i.e. the trunk and big branches — before you get into the leaves/details, or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”
- Elon Musk
“It’s not a sin to not get the deal ... It’s a sin to take a long time to not get the deal.”
- Chris Voss, "The 7 Deadly Sins of Negotiation"
“The wise are mightier than the strong, and those with knowledge grow stronger and stronger.”
- King Solomon, Proverbs 24:5 (NLT)
“People say youth is wasted on the young. I disagree. I believe wisdom is wasted on the old. All you can do is give it away, and the people you love the most don’t want it.”
- AJ Khubani, Founder & CEO of Telebrands
AJ texted Bill and me this quote today. He had told us a version when we visited him yesterday in Miami. It gave us pause for thought, and we were still discussing its implications this afternoon.
AJ had spoken to us about his history of being taken in by charlatans. He expressed frustration that one of his children was repeating his mistakes, yet wouldn't listen to good advice. He had all the wisdom of decades of experience to give away, but one of the people he cared most about in this world wouldn't receive his gift.
So we sat there and accepted the gift instead.
“For Americans and others like us fortunate enough to live in wealthy countries, being rich is like having more food than you need...The sad fact is that billions of people around the globe are food insecure. This means the main focus of their life is escaping starvation.”
“My point of this parallel is that being rich is equivalent to being food secure, except with money. When you’re food secure and hungry, you go to the kitchen and eat. When you’re rich, and you need money, you go to the bank get money. After a while, you rarely give it much thought, because there’s always more than enough, so why waste your time thinking about it?
“That’s where being wealthy begins and ends. It has no meaning other than that. Granted, being rich and never having to worry about money is a big deal, but it doesn’t mean more than the lack of worrying. Being rich doesn’t mean you’re any smarter, savvier or superior to anyone else. It just means you’re rich.”
- Steve Siebold, Secrets Self-Made Millionaires Teach Their Kids
“You can't replace reading with other sources of information like videos, because you need to read in order to write well, and you need to write in order to think well.”
“Writing is often the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about,” adds Farnam Street's Shane Parrish.
“Most people don’t understand how to handle uncertainty. They shy away from small risks, and without realizing it, they embrace the big, big risk. Businessmen who are consistently successful have the exact opposite attitude: Make all the mistakes you want, just make sure you’re going to be there tomorrow.”
(Source: Esquire)
Taleb is talking about traders who blow up. But I see wisdom here for my business as well.
For us, the small risk is investing in one's own projects. It can be quite costly to develop a product, create a commercial for that product and then fund the market testing. Since only about one in 10 projets succeed (industry-wide), there is a definite risk of losing one's money here, and the losses can mount up quickly.
However, these are the small risks in the grand scheme of things. The big money comes when projects succeed and roll out nationally. Getting a fair deal and a meaningful chunk of the profits requires having the leverage of a tested project you fully own. The timid — those who avoid the small risks of self-funding and sell-in early — get bad deals and miss out on the kind of brand equity that pays dividends for years to come.
“I have never, ever borrowed a penny. So I have zero credit record. No loans, no mortgage, nothing. Ever. When I had no money, I rented. I have an allergy to borrowing and a scorn for people who are in debt, and I don’t hide it. I follow the Romans’ attitude that debtors are not free people.”
(Source: Esquire)
“If fifty million people say a foolish thing ... it is still a foolish thing.”
- Anatole France
What a perfect quote to articulate the ad numeram fallacy!
Per My Logical Fallacy:
“The argumentum ad numeram wrongly equates the numbers in support of a contention with the correctness of it. Ideas which have mass support are not necessarily more likely to be right; but the ad numeram supposes that they are ...
“If ideas were decided by numbers, no new ones would ever be admitted. Every new idea starts out as a minority viewpoint and gains acceptance only if the evidence for it wins converts over from the prevailing view. If numbers are the test, then Giordano Bruno was wrong when he said the earth moved around the sun, and the authorities were right to burn him at the stake.”
“The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things – questions such as 'How did everything begin?' 'What are we all here for?' 'What is the point of living?'”
- Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar
“The scientist explores the world of phenomena by successive approximations. He knows that his data are not precise and that his theories must always be tested. It is quite natural that he tends to develop healthy skepticism, suspended judgment, and disciplined imagination — not only about other people's ideas but also about his own.”
- Edwin Hubble
Adding this one to the list of similar quotes from scientists and thinkers that includes Albert Einstein (here and here), Richard Feynman and Karl Popper.
(NB: The italics indicate the latter part of the quote may have been added by others.)
“Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understand it, earns it. He who doesn't, pays it.”
- (attributed to Albert Einstein)
“All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.”
- Naval Ravikant
Financial compounding can turn a consistent saver earning a mediocre salary into a multi-millionaire. That same powerful force can bankrupt a consistent borrower making only mediocre debt payments. Now imagine two siblings who start in the same place but go in these opposite directions. Because of compounding, they will have an ocean of financial difference between them in just a few decades.
As Naval observes, this is not just true of wealth. It's true of many other things: knowledge, health, relationships and more.
Might all success in life ultimately be explained as the compounding returns of good choices? And might all failures be explained as the compounding returns of poor ones?
Everyone is fallible. We all make good choices and some really bad ones. But perhaps it's the amount, direction and pattern of those choices that counts — because choices compound over time.
“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.”
- Alberto Brandolini, Italian programmer
Twitter commentator "Gurwinder" (@G_S_Bhogal) reformulates the law this way: “It takes a lot more energy to refute bullshit than to produce it. Hence, the world is full of unrefuted bullshit.”
We should all keep that in mind the next time we read something online. As I often say (sarcastically): “I read it on the Internet. It must be true!”
“We should never forget that good science is skeptical science. One way in which science proceeds is by attempting to falsify hypotheses; and further, we can embrace any given hypothesis; and then only tentatively, only for as long as we are unable to falsify it.”- Dr. Samuel Shapiro, founder of BU's Slone Epidemiology Center
Dr. Shapiro is yet another addition to a long and impressive list of great thinkers who have made similar points about science: Albert Einstein (here and here), Richard Feynman, Karl Popper, Nassim Taleb and Michael Crichton.
From these quoteworthy giants one idea becomes clear: The idea of a "scientific consensus" or "settled science" is antithetical to science.
(HT: Chris Kresser)
{This post is part of the Archive of Human Exploits}
“Humans are hardwired to focus on the left digit in numbers. It’s why products are priced at $3.99 instead of $4.00. But does this left-digit bias also affect medical decisions?” asked Dr. Babu Jena in a recent episode of the Freakonomics, M.D. podcast.
Dr. Jena was talking about something called left-digit bias and a study that examined the frequency of surgeries performed on heart-attack patients who were admitted to hospital two weeks before their 80th birthday (while they were still 79) compared to patients who were admitted two weeks after their 80th birthday. Per Forbes, the study found that:
“[P]atients who just turned 80 were 24% less likely to receive cardiac bypass surgery compared to medically similar 79-year old patients who were two weeks shy of their 80th birthday. The 80-year old patients also experienced higher death rates compared to the 79-year old patients, after 30 days of hospitalization.
“Furthermore, these discrepancies were not seen when comparing patients two weeks before and after their 77th, 78th, 79th, 81st, 82nd, or 83rd birthdates. Only the transition from age 79 to age 80 resulted in a statistically significant change in treatment.”
This human exploit has long been known to practitioners is my industry (As Seen on TV), the offer shown at the top of this post being so common it isn't even given much thought anymore. That is, no ASOTV marketer would ever market a product for $15 or $20. It's always $14.99 and $19.99. (On a side note, some still use $14.95 and $19.95 despite the fact this gives away four cents for no good reason. There is no corresponding right-digit bias!)
We use this little trick because we have long known that prices ending in 99 somehow feel like one dollar cheaper instead of just one penny cheaper. Now, apparently, there's an official name for it.
“The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality...
“Equally, there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities and characteristics. Birds fly not because they have a right to fly, but because they have wings...
“And what are the characteristics that evolved in humans? ‘Life’, certainly. But ‘liberty’? There is no such thing in biology. Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From a biological viewpoint, it is meaningless to say that humans in democratic societies are free, whereas humans in dictatorships are unfree.”
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
When I quote people on this blog, that usually implies I admire their thinking and agree with their conclusions. With the quote above, that isn't exactly the case. I'm not really a Harari admirer, and I only agree with his quote in a particular sense. That is, I think he's absolutely right about there being no basis for equality and rights in nature.
As I wrote recently to a friend: Isn’t Harari's quote a perfect rejoinder to the atheist who claims Christianity and the Bible are misogynistic, homophobic, racist or whatever? It seems every other atheist I encounter online is allegedly offended by my faith for these reasons. But these are moral reasons, and that creates an interesting dilemma.
When debating such people, I often ask the question this way: What's the basis for your morality? Atheists say they reject God and religion and embrace science instead. But this leads me to make the point Harari is making: There is no morality in evolution. The only reason an atheist thinks people of all races, genders, preferences, etc. should be equal is because of Judeo-Christian beliefs from the Bible.
This is the atheists' dilemma: The basis of their morality is the very book and religion they reject out of moral outrage.