Politics is the mind-killer. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all favorable claims, and argue against all unfavorable claims. Otherwise it’s like giving aid and comfort to the enemy, or stabbing your friends in the back.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

In a potentially contentious meeting, ask three good questions before you share your perspective, and you’ll see the room shift around you.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

Unless and until all members of a team have a common understanding of the problem, attempts to solve the problem are just so much wasted energy.

— Gerald Weinberg, Becoming a Technical Leader

It is one of the most remarkable features of the optimistic mindset that it will never accept responsibility for the effects of its own beliefs, or acknowledge the danger of the fallacies that have guided it.

— Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism

Blindness to ergodicity, which we will begin to define a few paragraphs down, is indeed in my opinion the best marker separating a genuine scholar who understands something about the world from an academic hack who partakes of ritualistic paper writing.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game