[T]he kind of mirage that came from modern data-dredging capabilities: if you watch trillions of things, you will often see one-in-a-million coincidences.

-- Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End

'Twas grief enough to think mankind

All hollow servile insincere -

But worse to trust to my own mind

And find the same corruption there

• Emily Bronte

The world of to-day attaches a large importance to mental independence, or thinking for oneself; yet the manner in which these things are cultivated is very partial. In some matters we are, perhaps too independent (for we need to think socially as well as to act socially); but in other matters we are not independent enough; we are hardly independent at all. For we always interpret mental independence as being independence of old things. But if the mind is to stand in a real loneliness and liberty, and judge mere time and mere circumstances, and all the wasting things of this world, if the mind is really a strong and emancipated judge of things unbribed and unbrowbeaten, it must assert its superiority, not merely to old things, but to new things.

It must forsee the old age of things still in a strenuous infancy. It must stand by the tombstone of the babe unborn. It must treat the twentieth century as it treats the twelfth, as something which by its own nature has already had an end. A free man must not only be free from the past; a free man must be free from the future. He must be ready to face the rising and increasing thing, and to judge it by immortal tests. It is a very poor ma

"I’ve found that’s all you have to do to get ahead in life, be non-idiotic and live a long time. It’s harder to be non-idiotic than most people think." - Charlie Munger

As usual, if you reverse the dependent and independent variables, the resulting headline is 100% intuitive.

Joel Grus

Your tactics are self-centered. You have forgotten that you are not the only player on the board, that inherent talent speaks for no more than experience, and that others around you seek to expand their authority and constrain yours. Your error is fundamental to the human psyche: you have allowed yourself to believe that others are mechanisms, static and solvable, whereas you are an agent.

Purity Cartone, in The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson, p. 180

“All the things I have done in my life that I am proud of are all things on the threshold of which I felt immense fear.” - Washington here

So I guess the real lesson is "figuring out which ideas are true is hard."

The alt-text of this xkcd comic.

The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed. Almost as horrible, but not quite.

-- Granny Weatherwax. Carpe Jugulum, Terry Pratchett

For those people who insist, however, that the only thing that is important is that the theory agrees with experiment, I would like to make an imaginary discussion between a Mayan astronomer and his student...

These are the opening words of a ~1.5 minute monologue in one of Feynman's lectures; I won't transcribe the remainder but it can be viewed here.

If these lines are read by a young geologist, then, especially for him, it should be noted that excitement in scientific work is harmful rather than useful. Caught in 'rare-metal fever', I took hundreds of samples but missed plenty of interesting things. I almost did not study enclosing rocks, totally ignored unique carbonate concretions, which in themselves could be a subject of a whole thesis, but saddest of all - I very superficially studied fossilized soils. Alas, the find fell in the hands of underprepared researcher.

Ya. E. Yudovitch. Gramm more expensive than tonne: rare elements in coals (p. 102, Moscow, 1989.)