10 Aphorisms from 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘗𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘳𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘴
Never explain why something important is important.
If you must explain it, don’t.
Knowing stuff others don’t know is most effective when others don’t know you know stuff they don’t know.
Language is largely made to show off, gossip, confuse people, delude them, charm them, seduce them, scare them, and exploit them. And, as a side effect, convey information. Just a side effect, you know.
The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit
When you say something, you think you are just saying something, but you are largely communicating why you had to say it.
Small injustice dresses up as vice; large injustice dresses up as virtue.
The worst damage has been caused by competent people trying to do good; the best improvements have been brought by incompetent ones not trying to do good.
An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds.
Some of these are good, not all of them
I don’t understand this quote. For example, let’s say I’m a loser bemoaning the fact that people are easy to scam. How should I exploit that for fun and profit? Scam people?
I’d love to explain but sadly I was just told not to
You could build an app that blocks scammers or a service that connects scammed people and pursues class action lawsuit to help them. You could also scam scammers themselves. You can recognize before other people that a company is a scam instead of the productive business it pretends to be and get rich by shorting it or gain fame and influence by proving it to the rest of the world.
I think the general message of the quote is that if one believes that they see the world much more accurately than (almost) anyone else, and yet they do not use this supposedly superior knowledge to make their own life better, they are actually not smart, but losers shifting blame.
That assumes that every piece of knowledge is actionable, and that acting upon it is the best use of your time.
If the piece of knowledge is not actionable, probably bemoaning it is not a good use time either.
This is dated. Vice signaling has become a central element of the public image of many perpetrators of large injustice.
Almost zero species do any writing (or, indeed, knowing) at all.