📚 Fabien's Highlights

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In marked contrast to this, almost none of our man-made engineered artifacts and systems, whether automobiles, houses, washing machines, or television sets, invoke the power of fractals to optimize performance. To a very limited extent, electronic equipment such as computers and smart phones does, but compared with how you work they are extraordinarily primitive. On the other hand, human-engineered systems that have grown organically such as cities, and to a limited extent corporations, have unconsciously evolved self-similar fractal structures which have tended to optimize their performance.

Scale

Geoffrey West

You always have three options: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you could leave it but not leaving it and not accepting it. That struggle or aversion is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: “accept.” [5]

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Eric Jorgenson, Jack Butcher, and Tim Ferriss

pioneers such as Galen of Pergamon (second century AD) propagated treatments like bloodletting and the use of mercury as an elixir. These treatments were devised with the best of intentions, and in line with the best knowledge available at the time. But many were ineffective, and some highly damaging. Bloodletting, in particular, weakened patients when they were at their most vulnerable. The doctors didn’t know this for a simple but profound reason: they never subjected the treatment to a proper test – and so they never detected failure. If a patient recovered, the doctor would say: ‘Bloodletting cured him!’ And if a patient died, the doctor would say: ‘He must have been very ill indeed because not even the wonder cure of bloodletting was able to save him!’

Black Box Thinking

Matthew Syed

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