Status Updates From Fooled by Randomness: The H...

“A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situations of conflict. Say you always have the same threshold of reactions. You take a set level of abuse, say seventeen insulting remarks per week, before getting into a rage and punching the eighteenth offender in the nose. Such predictability will allow people to take advantage of you up to that well known trigger point.”

“Science is great, but individual scientists are dangerous. They are human; they are marred by the biases humans have. Perhaps even more. For most scientists are hard headed, otherwise they would not derive the patience and energy to perform the Herculean tasks asked of them, like spending 18 hours a day perfecting their doctoral thesis.”

“We have been getting things wrong in the past and we laugh at our past institutions; it is time to figure out that we should avoid enshrining the present ones.”