If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
T.S. Eliot
Today, we mostly face the choice between those who write clearly about a subject they don’t understand and those who write poorly about a subject they don’t understand.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that we can make in a very narrow field.
Niels Bohr
You exist in full if and only if your conversation (or writings) cannot be easily reconstructed with clips from other conversations.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country
We are better at (involuntarily) doing out of the box than (voluntarily) thinking out of the box.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
To achieve great things you need a plan and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein
Part of what academics do is generate ideas and teach. The other, perhaps more important part is to play the role of “the Bu*l*hit Police”.
Mark Blyth, Austerity
