The research results simply say that the effects of individual ability, individual motivation, team ability, and team motivation dwarf other productivity factors. They do not say specifically that team T-shirts, free soda pop, windowed offices, productivity bonuses, or Friday afternoon beer busts improve motivation, but the implication is clear: any organization that wants to improve its productivity should be actively trying all these things.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

Be careful to avoid creating subgroups comprising friends who were already friends before they joined. They can end up building their own culture, and then maybe even leaving the company together.

— Alexander Grosse and David Loftesness, Scaling Teams

In the seventeenth century, René Descartes opted for reason over a divine source of knowledge. This came to be known as putting Descartes before the source.

— Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar…

Before the Reformation, almost no one believed that socially necessary labor was an ennobling activity. After the Reformation, almost everyone did

— James Livingston, Why Work? Breaking the Spell of The Protestant Ethic

This suggests that taking the outside view is an effective response to the planning fallacy: rather than trying to predict how many hiccups and delays your plans will run into by reflecting in detail on each plan’s particulars (the “inside view”), you can do better by just guessing that your future plans will work out roughly as well as your past plans.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Inadequate Equilibria