Policy implies the existence of an elite group—government officials, typically—that gets to decide on something (“a policy”) that they then arrange to be imposed on everybody else.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

The paradox of permanence and impermanence: only in the latter perspective was there any such thing as progress, or loss.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

In a famous study, advanced PhDs and undergraduate physics students were given sets of physics problems and asked to sort them into categories. Immediately, a stark difference became apparent. Whereas beginners tended to look at superficial features of the problem—such as whether the problem was about pulleys or inclined planes—experts focused on the deeper principles at work. “Ah, so it’s a conservation of energy problem,” you can almost hear them saying as they categorized the problem by what principles of physics they represented. This approach is more successful in solving problems because it gets to the core of how the problems work.

— Scott Young, Ultralearning

Knowing that I could be painfully wrong and curiosity about why other smart people saw things differently prompted me to look at things through the eyes of others as well as my own. This allowed me to see many more dimensions than if I saw things just through my own eyes.

— Ray Dalio, Principles

So the Big Bang doesn’t actually mark the beginning of our universe; it marks the end of our theoretical understanding.

— Sean Carroll, The Big Picture