writings on math, logic, philosophy and art

Epigrams

Buying more stuff will not bring you closer to happiness, just like living longer years will not bring you closer to immortality.

Everyone wants to be the best, noone wats to question the criteria that determine what the best is.

I don’t have any problem with Jeff Bezos going in space, the only thing I dislike is that he came back.

I assume that people who say that Karl Marx didn’t have a job are all writing monumental 1000-page studies as a hobby.

Nobody cares about the average person’s opinion, but everyone is deeply concerned what “the people” think.

Doing math leaves me feeling like a genius 10% of the time and like a complete idiot for the other 90%.

Viewing people as merely normal and non-normal is like viewing drinks as alcoholic and non-alcoholic.

Time is not money - you can convert time to money, but not the other way around.

The fact that someone does not feel the same emotions as you, that does not make them less emotional.

People often claim to come up with a new idea, instead of recognizing prior art and using a name that is already there, because they are eager to attach their names to something, out of sheer vanity (I call this “Jencel’s principle”)

Keeping notes is a good idea if you want a very large quantity of mediocre ideas.

Don’t try to impress others - they don’t care.

If someone does not feel the same emotions as you, that does not make him less emotional.

You won’t get good at something by practicing it for 10000 hours — you will get good by making 10000 mistakes.

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.

The clearest sign that people do not feel content with themselves is their desire to convert others to be like them.

And to think that we live in the best of all possible worlds, I mean, imagine what the rest of them look like.

Scientism isn’t a religion - it’s a cult.

When learning programming it’s important to write a lot of code and also to read a lot of code. Writing is to understand you are retarded and reading is to understand everyone else is retarded as well.

Hannah Arendt’s principle of the banality of evil is also valid in the other way around: not only that evil is banal, but all banal things are evil i.e. a thing is banal if and only if it is evil.

Any self-consistent system of knowledge can be reduced, at least theoretically, to a small number of clear elementary postulates and what follows from them. So, any system for which it is not immediately clear what these postulates are, is not self-consistent.

The less you have, the more valuable it is, this is a vision circle that leaves you obsessed for not losing your nothing.

Free time is the most precious resource that you can have in your life

Note to self: In order to have better ideas, I have to stop wasting my time with trying to categorize the ideas I already have and fit them in boxes — you either spend your effort to appear as brilliant or be brilliant, no time for both.

If you are feeling sad, you are thinking of yourself too much.

The default fallacy is the bias of questioning the logic of people who make different choices, but not the logic of the people who make the “default” choice.

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