As Carl Sagan put it, “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.” (Location 86)
Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn’t sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it’s backed up by proofs. (Location 122)
Exploration in itself has value, since trying new things increases our chances of finding the best. So taking the future into account, rather than focusing just on the present, drives us toward novelty. (Location 720)
“a man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure.” (Location 2040)
“ping attack” or a “denial of service” attack: give a system an overwhelming number of trivial things to do, and the important things get lost in the chaos. (Location 2048)
Live by the metric, die by the metric. (Location 2064)
A commitment to fastidiously doing the most important thing you can, if pursued in a head-down, myopic fashion, can lead to what looks for all the world like procrastination. (Location 2098)
“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least,” (Location 2100)
The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now. (Location 2156)
it is fundamentally a negotiation between two principles that aren’t fully compatible. These two principles are called responsiveness and throughput: how quickly you can respond to things, and how much you can get done overall. Anyone who’s ever worked in an office environment can readily appreciate the tension between these two metrics. It’s part of the reason there are people whose job it is to answer the phone: they are responsive so that others may have throughput. (Location 2287)
Learning self-control is important, but it’s equally important to grow up in an environment where adults are consistently present and trustworthy. (Location 2720)
If you can’t solve the problem in front of you, solve an easier version of it—and then see if that solution offers you a starting point, or a beacon, in the full-blown problem. (Location 3199)
it is much easier to multiply primes together than to factor them back out. With big enough primes—say, a thousand digits—the multiplication can be done in a fraction of a second while the factoring could take literally millions of years; (Location 3410)
“every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” (Location 4016)
Adopting a strategy that doesn’t require anticipating, predicting, reading into, or changing course because of the tactics of others is one way to cut the Gordian knot of recursion. (Location 4711)
The road to hell is paved with intractable recursions, bad equilibria, and information cascades. (Location 4714)
Seek out games where honesty is the dominant strategy. Then just be yourself. (Location 4715)
