The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bazaar encumbered with rich but cumbersome and never to be used articles.
The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and ignore the rest. The immediate fact which the science of logic has to take account of is that certain material is presented, certain aspects of this material are noted and emphasized.
The best ideas are often dangerous ideas. You're not supposed to think them. And if you do, you're not supposed to say them. But the truth doesn't care about your comfort.
We tend to conflate power-seeking AI and superintelligent (in science and tech) AI. I'm not denying that AI can be power-seeking. Whatever skills and drives Donald Trump has could be embodied in a digital mind. I'm simply pointing out that the way we're currently making AI systems smarter (training them to be really good coders, thought partners, and general coworkers) is not that strongly correlated with power.
The best way to think about the future is not by extrapolating the past, but by understanding the incentive structures and constraints that will shape decisions.
The primary cause of failure in leadership is that men do not think enough. They trust to their memories and their passions, and act from them, when they ought to consult their understandings.
The best investment is in yourself. But the second-best is almost always in a business that does something you understand, run by people you trust, at a price that makes sense.
The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are indifferent to others, remaining by nature blind to facts that are uncongenial to them.
The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are on the alert for them, and especially apt to be lively and to produce the感 of reality whenever they are stimulated.
The best way to think about the future is not by extrapolating the past, but by understanding what must be true about the future and then figuring out how we get there.
We do not think in words alone. We think in images, in sensations, in the movement and flow of muscle and nerve. Yet we must clothe our thought in words to communicate it, and so our words always betray the living truth a little.
The task, then, is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees.
worry is not driven by any specific fear, such as the fear that you might lose your job or a loved one may fall ill. Instead, they proposed, worry is driven by the inability to tolerate uncertainty itself.
The best ideas have some magical quality where one day they seem impossible, and the next day they seem inevitable. The hard part is being in the room when the transition happens.
The mind of man is capable of anything because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.
The best investment is in yourself. The second best is usually in a business that does something you don't understand, because then you're forced to think independently.
The difference between a wise decision and a foolish one is often not apparent until years later. What matters is having a systematic way to think about decisions, not the outcome of any single one.
The best way to think about the future is not by projecting the past, but by understanding what is actually changing in the world and which businesses benefit from that change versus which ones get hurt by it.
The difference between a good business decision and a bad one is often not the decision itself, but whether you had the intellectual humility to reverse it when new information arrived.
Contrary to the standard belief that our senses are a kind of passive window onto the world, what is emerging is a picture of an ever-active brain that is always striving to predict what the world might currently have to offer. Those predictions then structure and shape the whole of human experience, from the way we interpret a person's facial expression, to our feelings of pain, to our plans for an outing to the cinema.
The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are negative to others, making us accept or reject much that we might theoretically be indifferent to.
The natural object is always the adequate symbol. I naturally dress my thoughts in pictures.
The best business decision is often the one you don't make. Most of life's errors come from doing things, not from leaving them undone.
It's hard to recognize you're in a sci-fi novel when you're living through it, but if you zoom out a little bit, it sure looks like we are.
The true nature of things is in their particulars, not in generalities; we know a thing by knowing its individual characteristics, not by subsumming it under a class.
A model of the cyclic universe suggests that dark matter could be a population of black holes predating the Big Bang.
The difference between a tolerable decision and a good decision is that a good decision can be explained in one sentence. If you find yourself giving a speech to justify it, you've made a tolerable decision.
Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so. It is an easy task, because people who are intellectually lazy are convinced that this miserable terror is "the truth", that this terror is knowledge of the "extra-mental" world. This is an easy way out, resulting in a banal explanation of the world as terrifying.
The best investment is in yourself, but the second-best is often in businesses where you can understand what they do and where they're going better than the market does.
For all the book smarts of LLMs, they currently have little sense for how the real world works and there's a growing list of "world model" AI startups trying to fill the gap.
Mario shares how he uses real-time data and second-derivative thinking to make decisions, how he hires and develops A players (and the gut test that tells you who isn't one), how he runs meetings that surface the best thinking from the most junior person in the room, and why ego, complacency, and small goals quietly cap everything.
The problem isn't that they lack ideas; it's that they try to prioritize fundamentally different kinds of systems as if they were the same thing. Treating architecturally different products as if they're in the same category makes effective prioritization nearly impossible.
The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What he has to do is to accept it or reject it, take it or leave it.
The difference between a business that compounds and one that doesn't is often not the talent of the founder, but the defensibility of the moat—and most founders underestimate how much time it takes to build one.
The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are interested in them, and consequently neglects the rest. The result is that whilst the world of each of us, as we know it, is a sort of mental monster—selectively interested, systematically partial.
I'm drawn to anything that peeks behind the curtain of power - both are fascinating takes on how the world really works, and help me to tune out a lot of the daily noise and negativity.
The true nature of things is in their particulars, not in generalities; we know the world through its infinite variations, not through abstract rules that pretend to govern them.
The difference between a business that compounds and one that doesn't is often not the brilliance of the idea, but the willingness to accept small returns for decades while reinvesting everything. Most people can't do this psychologically.
The best process for making decisions is often worse than the best decision-maker. Process forces you to justify actions in advance; great decision-makers often know things they can't yet articulate. The trap is confusing process with wisdom.
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. Every man is wise when attacked by a disease from which he is never likely to suffer.
The mind itself is the seat of action. We do not act because we think, but we think because we act.
The investor of today does not profit from yesterday's growth. It is the always-uncertain future growth upon which the investor must capitalize, and it is those who will profit who must pay the delicate task of correctly appraising such uncertain future.
The best investment is in yourself. But the second-best investment is often in things that are so obvious and so important that nobody is paying attention to them because everyone assumes someone else is handling it.
But it is hard to find much sign that it is doing so. And Gillian Tett: [I]nvestors need to get better at imagining — and pricing — once-unimaginable disasters. This is hard. No business school teaches students how to model something like a presidential threat to wipe out a civilisation.
The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting. If you have the temperament, you can make a lot of money by sitting on your ass.
The true paradox of consciousness is that the more narrowly we examine it, the more it seems to elude us, as if consciousness were not an object to be grasped but a field in which the grasping occurs.
The difference between a mediocre business and a great business is that the great business finds a way to do the same thing at 1/10th the cost. Most people focus on revenue growth; they should focus on unit economics.
The mind does not work by starting from universal principles and deducing particular consequences; it works the other way, by gathering up particular cases until the accumulated weight of them forces upon us recognition of a universal principle.
The purpose of consciousness is to orchestrate behavior, and consciousness succeeds brilliantly at this task when it stays in the background, when it doesn't interfere with the smooth operation of the automatic processes that have been honed by natural selection.
The best thing for your long-term results is to be boring. Exciting investing is likely to be bad for your wealth. Most of the time, the best thing to do is nothing.
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
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