"If you have a job, do not attempt to work as hard as possible. Instead, work as hard as you can without risking your health, marriage, or mental sanity. These three are damn hard to recover once lost.[12] More in general, in any endeavor in which success depends on you accumulating some kind of resource (money, skill, connections, trust[13], etc.), do not maximize growth regardless of survival. Instead, maximize growth that conserves survival."
"Whenever an activity cannot be assumed repeatable at infinity, we should be wary of expecting to achieve its average outcome."
"- We call “population outcome” the outcome of many people performing an action once, and “lifetime outcome” the outcome of one person performing an action many times. If they differ, the system that produces them is non-ergodic. - You can only rely on expected outcomes if you are guaranteed a large number of repetitions. Otherwise, they are misleading. (The law of large numbers requires a large number of repetitions). - Risk aversion is rational in the presence of non-ergodicity"
"A common critique is, “decisions taken at lower levels are inefficient for they lack economies of scale.” However, they more than make it up with the benefits of tailoring. They provide more of what would be good for the province and less of what would be bad. Isn’t this efficiency?"
"You are not your habits nor your beliefs. You are their container. Their survival is not yours. What’s best for them might or might not be what’s best for you."
"- Use protections (of all kinds – Personal Protective Equipment, insurances, capped-downside options, and so on). "
"The Precautionary Principle holds that we should not take risks that endanger the whole,[72] no matter how unlikely. If we keep taking them, we are guaranteed to blow up (remember the Russian Roulette player?)."
"It is not the best ones who succeed. It is the best ones of those who survive."
"Problems grow the size they need for them to be acknowledged."