…the one who doesn’t look the part, conditional on having made a (sort of) successful career in his profession, had to have much to overcome in terms of perception. And if we are lucky enough to have people who do not look the part, it is thanks to the presence of some skin in the game, the contact with reality that filters out incompetence, as reality is blind to looks.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

There just isn’t any good substitute for genuine curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires.

— Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way

…objections people raise are really requests for information in disguise.

— Janice Fraser, Jason Fraser, and Eric Ries, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama

Better, surely, not to pretend to calculate the incalculable, not to pretend that there is an Archimedean point outside the world whence everything is measurable and alterable; better to use in each context the methods that seem to fit it best, that give the (pragmatically) best results; to resist the temptations of Procrustes; above all to distinguish what is isolable, classifiable and capable of objective study, and sometimes of precise measurement and manipulation, from the most permanent, ubiquitous, inescapable, intimately present features of our world, which, if anything, are overfamiliar, so that their ‘inexorable’ pressure, being too much with us, is scarcely felt, hardly noticed, and cannot conceivably be observed in perspective, be an object of study.

— Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff, The Hedgehog and the Fox