Many of the dramas of human social life—the sagas of sympathy, trust, favor, debt, revenge, gratitude, guilt, shame, treachery, gossip, reputation—may be understood as the playing of strategies in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

Teaching a company to value something it doesn’t care about is the hardest sort of work you can do, and it often fails, so you should do as little of it as you can, but no less.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

Simple does not mean easy. Simple means untangled, and untangling things is hard.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Craftsmanship

People want the chance to do what they naturally do best every day. Because weaknesses never turn into strengths, but strengths develop continually with practice.

— Gallup.com, How to Create a Strengths- Based Company Culture

…history abounds with lessons on the price of being the first, or even the second, to say that the Emperor has no clothes.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind