Respect!

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his  theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." -- H. L. Mencken

Analytical vs. what's possible

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations. -- John Von Neumann

Opções

Aceitar o que  a vida nos trouxe é reprimir a ilusão de que merecíamos mais; adaptarmo-nos é não desistir da ideia. Nos intervalos, morangos e champagne (a versão jet set) ou cerveja e futebol (a minha). -- Filipe Nunes Vicente

The Priority of the Obvious

We need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure. -- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Calculus of Blame

In everyday thinking, things you've done on purpose are highly blameworthy, risks you understood but disregarded are less blameworthy, and risks you didn't understand but should have are even less so. On the other side of the equation, risks that you had no reason to understand, or risks so remote that they couldn't have reasonably been avoided, are basically not blameworthy at all. They may have bad effects, but we can round those bad effects down to zero and ignore them. -- Andreas Schou

Categorical mistakes

There are decisions where:

1. Outcomes are known. This is the easiest way to make decisions. If I hold out my hand and drop a ball, it will fall to the ground.
2. Outcomes are unknown, but probabilities are known. This is risk. Think of this as going to Vegas and gambling. Before you set foot at the table, all of the outcomes are known as are the probabilities of each. No outcome surprises an objective third party.
3. Outcomes are unknown and probabilities are unknown. This is uncertainty.

We often think we’re making decisions in #2 but we’re really in #3. Ignorance is a state of the world where some possible outcomes are unknown: when we’ve moved from #2 to #3. -- Suhit Anantula

in a way that makes sense

"What happens, happens," Carla offered gnomically. "Everything in the Cosmos has to be consistent. All we get to do is talk about it in a way that makes sense to us"-- The Eternal Flam, Greg Egan