Motivated by Tyler Cowen’s 12 rules

  1. Everything is relevant. Breakthroughs come from the most unexpected places.
  2. Risk and ideas have meaning only in the context of a time frame.
  3. Most who ask for your opinion only want confirmation. Less than half those who ask for your opinion want it. Don’t waste it on those who do not ask; it will only piss them off.
  4. Don’t waste time killing someone who is busy committing suicide.
  5. There is no arc of history or a grand design or theory of the future. History can make the impossible into the inevitable.
  6. Progress is inevitable, pushed by man’s desire to better his condition. We can screw it up in countless and incredibly severe ways, but we progress anyway.  Look how much better off we are today from 1900 despite two world wars and the Great Depression, and thousands of violent conflicts and collapses.
  7. Get the whole story. Part of the truth is more misleading than all of a lie.
  8. “Don’t confuse a problem to be solved with a fact to be accepted.” – Shimon Peres
  9. A fact or an idea does not cease to exist because you ignore it.
  10. Thinking is hard and lonely work. That is why so few people do it.
  11. “Every snowflake pleads innocent, but it is still an avalanche.” Stanislaw Lec
  12.  If you can’t identify the sucker at the poker table, it’s you.
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