Laurus
by
“The trouble with some kinds of warfare (and be certain the Tyrant knew this, because it is implicit in his lesson) is that they destroy all moral decency in susceptible types. Warfare of these kinds will dump the destroyed survivors back into an innocent population that is incapable of even imagining what such returned soldiers might do.”
― Heretics of Dune
― Heretics of Dune
“The average expert was a horrific forecaster. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, academic degrees, and even (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting, bad at long-term forecasting, and bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that some future event was impossible or nearly impossible, it nonetheless occurred 15 percent of the time. When they declared a sure thing, it failed to transpire more than one-quarter of the time.”
― Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
― Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
“We all have scars, we gonna have more. Rather than struggle against time and waste it, let’s dance with time and redeem it. Cause we don’t live longer when we try not to die. We live longer when we are too busy living.”
― Greenlights
― Greenlights
“In one of the most cited studies of expert problem solving ever conducted, an interdisciplinary team of scientists came to a pretty simple conclusion: successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it. Less successful problem solvers are more like most students in the Ambiguous Sorting Task: they mentally classify problems only by superficial, overtly stated features, like the domain context.”
― Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
― Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
“Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is increasingly obsolete. They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience. And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts. Faced with any problem they had not directly experienced before, the remote villagers were completely lost. That is not an option for us. The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.”
― Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
― Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
Donna Tartt
— 274 members
— last activity Aug 05, 2025 07:51AM
For readers who, like me, love both of Donna Tartt's novels, The Secret History (1992) and The Little Friend (2002) and may be wondering what happened ...more
Caroliniana Athenaeum
— 8 members
— last activity Feb 17, 2021 06:58AM
A bi-weekly reading group for the members of the Caroliniana Athenaeum. Members of the Caroliniana Athenaeum may add events, create polls, submit revi ...more
Charles McBryde’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Charles McBryde’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Charles McBryde
Lists liked by Charles McBryde




















































