boldness is you take risks courage could imply you take wise risks, while mere fearlessness and boldness could be recklessness, or absence of fear – not the wise overcoming of fear arrogance is you’re stubborn maybe you talk too much too or maybe you don’t talk that much — you just don’t change your …
Tag: Risk
Should You Be Strategically Self-Effacing?
The real humility is epistemic humility You should just be REAL. As confident as warranted by data. No more, no less Reality tempers your confidence. You can be good but you’re never good enough. If life doesn’t humble you — you’re not challenging yourself enough Pretending you’re smaller than you are is …
The Courage to Be Ignorant
The main reason we fail to own up our ignorance is the discomfort of not having control the EXISTENTIAL DREAD, truly It’s better to rub a bromide in one’s own face than to face the abyss But the other reason is that we’re so tribal And tribes optimise themselves for homogeneity And no matter …
how to GET WHAT YOU WANT (2026 version)
You getting what you want is NOT completely mysterious, but it is confusing First It has to be POSSIBLE, and preferably plausible There are CRAZY goals that are likely impossible -having everything, sacrificing nothing -being remembered, immortal physically or historically -having THAT PARTICULAR thing, that particular way -etc Then there are AMBITIOUS …
To Know What You Want, Take It Apart
Knowing what you want is extremely complicated Because most things you don’t have — you don’t have for a reason That reason is the cost And that cost itself often comprises multiple variables And of course the very value, the reward — often comprises multiple variables too It is useful then to reason from …
Getting an Opportunity vs Taking Advantage of an Opportunity
There are opportunities You get more of them or less of them And then you succeed at taking advantage of them, or fail to take advantage of them We often fail to take advantage of our opportunities That’s because we don’t view them as opportunities We don’t view them as opportunities because we don’t …
Contrarianism Is Downstream From Being Right
Are you a contrarian? Or just a fool? The question to ask is: Are you MORE OFTEN RIGHT than others? If not — then you’re just a fool, aren’t you? Of course there’s the question of payoff Maybe your scepticism makes you unduly reject prevailing wisdom sometimes, And maybe it makes you susceptible …
Broad, then Depth, then OPPORTUNISM
-Let’s define broad as “the whole” -Let’s define narrow as the smallest division -Let’s consider “normal” breadth as the kind of breadth of subject matters that most people engage -Let’s consider “normal” narrow as the kind of focus that most people achieve in their single career First let’s acknowledge that those two are not …
UNLUCKY Overstate The Role Of Luck — LUCKY Understate The Role Of Luck
The unlucky overstate the role of luck The lucky understate the role of luck It boils down to incentives, and even to epistemology (theory of knowledge) On the extreme — the extremely lucky has NO DATA invalidating the role of HIMSELF, and something SPECIAL about himself — in his exceptional outcomes He is, …
The “GRADIENT”, The FUZZY LOGIC of Various Problems
Many problems can’t be broken down to chains with finite-state nodes: -e.g. 2-3 options here, then 2 options from there, then another 4 options, etc. -with each step having an OBJECTIVE SOLUTION, for given ends Instead it’s this network of INTERCONNECTED nodes, with most things fuzzy (but NOT indeterminate) -each node falling SOMEWHERE on …