Reading

At the end of the problem-solving process, you have eliminated something—the solution to a problem dissolves the problem—whereas at the end of the question-answering process, you have something—whatever it was you are looking for. The question culminates in its answer.

p. 215

In my experience, people who don't viscerally understand Moloch's toolbox and the ubiquitously broken Nash equilibria of real life and how group insanity can arise from intelligent individuals responding to their own incentives tend to unconsciously translate all assertions about relative system competence into assertions about relative status. If you don't see systemic competence as rare, or don't see real-world systemic competence as driven by rare instances of correctly aligned incentives, all that's left is status.

p. 195

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck but has an alibi, it's not a duck.

p. 135

It is true that wealth can be accumulated to a point where no individual life-span can use it up, so that the family rather than the individual becomes its owner. Yet wealth remains something to be used and consumed no matter how many individual lifespan it may sustain. Only when wealth became capital, whose chief function was to generate more capital, did private property equal or come close to the permanence inherent in the commonly shared world.

p. 68