…anytime you face a difficult decision, you should have no less than 40% and no more than 70% of the information you need to make that decision. In that range, you have enough information to make an informed choice but not so much intelligence that you lose your resolve and simply stay abreast of the situation. This makes you faster than more “informed” people and more informed than “fast” people.

— Peter Hollins, Mental Models

We understand that sometimes good practice is ahead of good theory, and that industry knows some things that academe does not.

— Robert L. Glass and Tom DeMarco, Software Creativity 2.0

…what we cannot reach flying, we must reach limping.

— Roman Gelperin, Addiction, Procrastination and Laziness

Using mathematics when it’s not needed is not science but scientism.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

It is one of the ironies of modern intellectual life that many scholars insist that rationality is impotent, that our efforts at reasoning are at best a smoke screen to justify selfish motivations and irrational feelings. And to make this point, these scholars write books and articles complete with complex chains of logic, citations of data, and carefully reasoned argument. It’s like someone insisting that there is no such thing as poetry—and making this case in the form of a poem.

— Paul Bloom, Against Empathy