Emrys

“Abraham Lincoln was correct when he said that less than one-half day's cost of the Civil War could have purchased the freedom of all the slaves in Delaware.

The Civil War cost the two sides a total of $6.6 billion in 1860s dollars, enough to buy the freedom of all the slaves at their 1860 market value, give each slave family 40 acres and a mule and make $3.5 billion in reparations to former slaves in lieu of 100 years of back wages.”
― Claudia Goldin

“The Hebrew Bible tells the story of the Gileadites, who defeated the Ephraimites around 1200 BC, driving them from their homes and across the Jordan River. Following the battle, many surviving Ephraimites attempted to return home, seeking passage from the Gileadites who guarded the river crossings. To ferret out Ephraimite refugees, the Gileadite guards employed a simple test: They asked travelers seeking passage to pronounce the Hebrew word shibboleth. (The word refers to the grain-bearing part of a plant.) The ancient Ephraimite dialect had no sh sound, making it hard for Ephraimites to pronounce this word. According to the Bible, forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed because they couldn’t say sh.”
― Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

“Even so, most of the stories people told about Amos [Tversky] had less to do with what came out of his mouth than with the unusual way he moved through the world. He kept the hours of a vampire. He went to bed when the sun came up and woke up at happy hour. He ate pickles for breakfast and eggs for dinner. He minimized quotidian tasks he thought a waste of time—he could be found in the middle of the day, having just woken up, driving himself to work while shaving and brushing his teeth in the rearview mirror. “He never knew what time of the day it was,” said his daughter, Dona. “It didn’t matter. He’s living in his own sphere and you just happened to encounter him there.” He didn’t pretend to be interested in whatever others expected him to be interested in—God help anyone who tried to drag him to a museum or a board meeting. “For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like,” Amos liked to say, plucking a line from the Muriel Spark novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. “He just skipped family vacations,” says his daughter. “He’d come if he liked the place. Otherwise he didn’t.” The children didn’t take it personally: They loved their father and knew that he loved them. “He loved people,” said his son Oren. “He just didn’t like social norms.

A lot of things that most human beings would never think to do, to Amos simply made sense. For instance, when he wanted to go for a run he . . . went for a run. No stretching, no jogging outfit or, for that matter, jogging: He’d simply strip off his slacks and sprint out his front door in his underpants and run as fast as he could until he couldn’t run anymore. “Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment,” said his friend Avishai Margalit, “and he himself decided very early on it was not worth it.”

What all those who came to know Amos eventually realized was that the man had a preternatural gift for doing only precisely what he wanted to do. Varda Liberman recalled visiting him one day and seeing a table with a week’s worth of mail on it. There were tidy little stacks, one for each day, each filled with requests and entreaties and demands upon Amos’s time: job offers, offers of honorary degrees, requests for interviews and lectures, requests for help with some abstruse problem, bills. When the new mail came in Amos opened anything that interested him and left the rest in its daily pile. Each day the new mail arrived and shoved the old mail down the table. When a pile reached the end of the table Amos pushed it, unopened, off the edge into a waiting garbage can. “The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.” “I would say to Amos I have to do this or I have to do that,” recalled his old friend Yeshu Kolodny. “And he would say, ‘No. You don’t.’ And I thought: lucky man!”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“World-class chess players, in addition to being considered awesomely smart, are generally assumed to have superhuman memories, and with good reason. Champions routinely put on exhibitions in which they play lesser opponents while blindfolded; they hold the entire chessboard in their heads. Some of these exhibitions strike the rest of us as simply beyond belief. The Czech master Richard Reti once played twenty nine blindfolded games simultaneously. (Afterward he left his briefcase at the exhibition site and commented on what a poor memory he had.)”
― Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else