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The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. It is indifferent to our need for certainty, and it is precisely this indifference that makes the pursuit of understanding so urgent.

— Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (1956)
6d ago

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall.

1w ago

It is a truth very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable; and even if we cannot discover which of the alternatives is the more probable, we must nevertheless choose one of them.

4w ago

We know accurately only when we know little; with knowledge doubt increases.

1mo ago

The longing for certainty and repose is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

1mo ago

The demand of the human intellect is for a world in which something is permanently true. Science gives us a world in which everything is provisionally true — which is not at all the same thing.

1mo ago

The truth is that we never know for certain about anything. The degree of assurance we feel about any proposition is not a measure of its truth, but a measure of our familiarity with the evidence bearing on it.

1mo ago
asteriskmag.com
Boarding China’s Last Bus

for a population that lived through the mass layoffs of the 1990s, optimism and fear can look identical from the outside.

1mo ago

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. But stranger still is the fact that it does — partially, provisionally, and always at the cost of uprooting what we thought we already knew.

2mo ago

Risk means more things can happen than will happen. The dangerous investor is not the one who doesn't know what will happen, but the one who doesn't know what he doesn't know.

2mo ago

The true paradox of human existence is that we are condemned to be free; we are forced to choose, and yet there is no certain ground on which to base our choices.

2mo ago

The human mind is like a flashlight in the dark. It illuminates a small circle of the world around us, but beyond that circle lies an infinite darkness that we can never fully penetrate.

2mo ago

We do not know what we may be able to do until we try, and we can never be certain beforehand that an experience is worth having until we have had it.

2mo ago
themarginalian.org
The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet

We place life's bets by countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious, only to discover over and over how short they fall of the wildest reaches of the possible, which always includes but exceeds the probable. It helps to remember that we ourselves are children of improbability, that everything we treasure exists not because it had to, not because it was likely or necessary, but because the universe took a gamble against the staggering odds otherwise.

3mo ago

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.

3mo ago

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.

3mo ago
ftav
It's quiet. Too quiet

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.

3mo ago
stratechery.com
2026.14: Apple, Acceleration, and AI

This wasn't just a podcast about Apple, but about how tech has changed over the last fifty years, and why AI makes even the most reliable narrators of history increasingly uncertain about the future.

4mo ago
asteriskmag.com
Merchants of Certainty

We can't predict the full impact of climate change. Why did the climate movement stop pushing the world to accept this fact and start trying to deny it?

4mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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