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id, aliases, title, tags
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Favorite Quotes
About Tools
[!quote] John Culkin, commonly attributed to Marshall McLuhan We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us.
[!quote] thoreau_1854_walden, Henry David Thoreau Men have become the tools of their tools.
[!quote] Jeff Duntemann A good tool improves the way you work. A great tool improves the way you think.
[!quote] Alan Watts We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions, and ideas.
[!quote] Paul Arden If you get stuck, draw with a different pen. Change your tools; it may free your thinking.
About Incentives
[!quote] Charlie Munger Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.
[!cite] Goodhart's Law When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
About Process Optimization
"Sharpen the Axe"
Frequently misattributed to Abraham Lincoln is some variation of:
[!quote] Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
For the legitimate origin of the quote see reverend-william-h-alexander.
I think when people use some version of the quote in real life it's usually to justify second definition yak shaving (at least that's usually when I use it).
[!quote] Ecclesiastes 10:10, King James Version If the iron be blunt, and he do not whet the edge, then must he put to more strength: but wisdom is profitable to direct.
I like the story because it's well known and easily interpreted as an optimization problem.
About Learning
[!quote] hubbard_2020_failure#Why It's Hard To Know What Works The placebo effect might not be as persistent if it were easier to learn from our experience... But learning is not a given in any environment.
About Originality
[!quote] Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices, p. 67 A way of doing something original is by trying something so painstaking that nobody else has ever bothered with it.
About Hypocrisy
[!quote] Luke 6:42, King James Version Either how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye.