André Luiz

“Journalist Philip Gourevitch reports an interview with a Rwandan lawyer who said: “Conformity is very deep, very developed here. In Rwandan history, everyone obeys authority. People revere power, and there isn’t enough education. You take a poor, ignorant population, and give them arms, and say, ‘It’s yours. Kill.’ They’ll obey.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“Education has benefits aside from stabilizing family incomes. Education makes individuals more polished dinner partners, for instance, something non-negligible. But the idea of educating people to improve the economy is rather novel. The British government documents, as early as fifty years ago, an aim for education other than the one we have today: raising values, making good citizens, and “learning,” not economic growth (they were not suckers at the time)—a point also made by Alison Wolf. Likewise, in ancient times, learning was for learning’s sake, to make someone a good person, worth talking to, not to increase the stock of gold in the city’s heavily guarded coffers. Entrepreneurs,”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don’t talk, and it would be unfair, wrong, and downright insulting to measure them in the talk department. The same with artisans: the quality lies in their product, not their conversation—in fact they can easily have false beliefs that, as a side effect (inverse iatrogenics), lead them to make better products, so what? Bureaucrats, on the other hand, because of the lack of an objective metric of success and the absence of market forces, are selected on the “halo effects” of shallow looks and elegance. The side effect is to make them better at conversation. I am quite certain a dinner with a United Nations employee would cover more interesting subjects than one with some of Fat Tony’s cousins or a computer entrepreneur obsessed with circuits.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“As one example, David Norman Smith, a sociologist at the University of Kansas, points out that exceptionally intense violence occurs with significantly greater frequency in cultures where children are routinely physically or emotionally abused or denied affection.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing