Category: Notes

What is it that characterizes the thinker? First of all, and obviously, vision…The thinker is pre-eminently a man who sees where others do not. The novelty of what he says, its character as a sort of revelation, the charm that attaches to it, all come from the fact that he sees. He seems to be head and shoulders above the crowd, or to be walking on the ridge-way while others trudge at the bottom. Independence is the word which describes the moral aspect of this capacity for vision. Nothing is more striking than the absence of intellectual independence in most human beings: they conform in opinion, as they do in manners, and are perfectly content with repeating formulas. While they do so, the thinker calmly looks around, giving full play to his mental freedom. He may agree with the consensus known as public opinion, but it will not be because it is a universal opinion. Even the sacrosanct thing called plain commonsense is not enough to intimidate him into conformity. What could seem nearer to insanity, in the sixteenth century, than the denial of the fact—for it was a fact—that the sun revolves around the earth? Galileo did not mind: his intellectual bravery should be even more surprising to us than his physical courage…Einstein’s denial of the principle that two parallels can never meet is another stupendous proof of intellectual independence.

– Ernest Dimnet

It is a deeply held conviction within economics that our world can be reduced to models that are founded on the solid ground of axioms, plumbed by deductive logic into rigorous, universal mathematical structures. Economists think they have things figured out, but our economic behavior is so complex, our interactions are so profound that there is no mathematical shortcut for determining how they will evolve. The only way to know what the result of these interactions will be is to trace out their path over time: we essentially must live our lives to see where they will go. There is no formula that allows us to fast-forward to find out what the result will be. The world cannot be solved; it has to be lived.

– Richard Bookstaber

You can certainly have a situation where there’s absolutely no growth in a business and it’s a much better investment than some company that’s going to grow at very substantial rates — particularly if they’re going to need capital in order to grow. There’s a huge difference between the business that grows and requires lots of capital to do so and the business that grows and doesn’t require capital. And, generally, financial analysts don’t apply adequate weight to the difference between those. In fact, it’s amazing how little attention is paid to that.

– Warren Buffett

When constrained systems, those hungry for natural disorder, collapse, as they are eventually bound to, since they are fragile, failure is never seen as the result of fragility. Rather, such failure is interpreted as the product of poor forecasting. As with a crumbling sand pile, it would be unintelligent to attribute the collapse of a fragile bridge to the last truck that crossed it, and even more foolish to try to predict in advance which truck might bring it down. Yet it is done all too often.

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

What you want is products that are bought, not sold.

– Andy Rachleff

Well, I send a letter to the managers and I talk to them about widening the moat. I say it isn’t the question of the earnings per share this quarter or anything like that. Any business that has a widening moat is gonna make a lot of money over time. They are guardians of the moat. I say a great business is like an economic castle. And if you have an economic castle in capitalism, there gonna be a bunch of people that are going to try and take it away from you. So I need a knight in that castle, the manager, who worries about protecting that castle all the time. And then I want this moat around it, and I want that moat to get wider. It may be service, it may be better product design, all kinds of things. It can be what’s in their mind about the product, a consumer product. But I want that moat to be widening. And I want people to toss sharks and piranha, octopus, everything into that moat to keep away those competitors because they’re gonna be coming and our managers are charged with that. I tell our managers, pretend that this is the only business that you and your family can own for the next hundred years, you can’t sell it and you’ve got to make this one work. And that means every day thinking about what’s going to make it a great business over a 100 years.

– Warren Buffett

True creativity is characterised by a succession of acts each dependent on the one before and suggesting the one after. This kind of cumulative creativity led to the development of Polaroid photography.

– Edwin Land

Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.

– Daniel Kahneman

It’s impossible for anything rational to successfully evolve because the byproduct of being optimally rational and efficient is that you’d be predictable. If you are completely predictable, you’d be dead. The military do not look for the most efficient route from A to B, because the most efficienct route would be the one that’s most heavily guarded. So there is a huge danger in looking at life as if it’s an optimization problem. At some point our psychology has to have evolved to be a bit weird and random and unpredictable, for the simple reason that someone who’s predictable would be deceased.

– Rory Sutherland