Truth
There is no one truth in this world. The truth is a nascent thing, it is a fragile thing. It comes from different angles, different perspectives. The truth is probably broader than a narrow view”
Raoul Pal
When you are a college freshman, a great piece of literature is just a story. Read it 20 years later, and it’s a lesson in life
— Nichola Vardy
One of the best ways to learn is by doing. And not by doing well but by doing badly. And making mistakes. Explaining what those mistakes were.
— Joel Greenblatt
Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it – in a decade, a century, or a millennium – we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?
— John Archibald Wheeler, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 480 (1986)
A good reading filter is more art than science. You’ll have to find one that works for you. The bigger point is that the highest odds of finding the right piece of information comes from inundating yourself with information but very quickly being able to say, “that ain’t it.”
— Morgan Housel (link)
Even knowing that I don’t know can’t cure me of acting as if I know. That intuitive Aha! is as irrepressible as my breathing or my heartbeat. Overconfidence is the feeling of knowing — even when part of me knows, or should know, that I don’t. I love saying “I don’t know,” but I don’t love it nearly as much as I should; just as water is the universal solvent, “I don’t know” should be our universal first response to nearly every hard question…
… What I learned, those first days of college so long ago, wasn’t how to stop being overconfident. (I’m old enough now to realize that I’m unlikely ever to learn that.) What I learned was the power of feedback, the importance of throwing yourself open to being corrected in public. That doesn’t eliminate error and misjudgment. It does teach you to do your homework, to consider the historical and social contexts of your evidence before you draw conclusions, to evaluate the quality of your information before you act on it, to go back and check your work again before you commit, and above all to think twice. Making your decisions as if you will publicly judged on them can, perversely, lead to a different kind of overconfidence: the belief that you’ve now been so careful that you can’t possibly be wrong. But you will at least reduce the risks from the most common upstreamsources of error, like making snap judgments, relying on faulty data, and overlooking relevant evidence.“
— Jason Zweig (link)
