Wisdom
Let's pick the one in a hundred most aggressive person from the random population. Well, they are all men. And that's why all the people in prison are men
If you took a random woman out of the population and a random man and you had to bet on who was more temperamentally aggressive, if you bet on the man you'd be right 60 percent of the time
Even if you don't know the history but have a complete understanding of human beings, you would say - well, equality of outcome does not make sense
If you have real true freedom, you'll never have an equality of outcome
Hard work
I know some guys that work all the time. They don't just work, they work so efficiently and so effectively and make use of every second in ways you can't even imagine unless you're in that sort of position. Doing that doesn't mean you'll succeed but not doing it certainly means that you will fail
I can't imagine anything we could possibly strive for in our society that would make it into hell faster than equality of outcome. Historical evidence for the pathology of that root is so strong. You have to be historically ignorant beyond belief or malevolent or resentful beyond comprehension in order to think that that's a good idea
You can be anti radical left without falling all the way into the far right
White lies and black truths
There are white lies and black truths. A black truth is when you use the truth in a way that isn't truthful - just like a white lie is when you lie in a way that isn't harmful. You can use the truth to wound and hurt and what that really means is that you've misused the truth and so it's actually a complex form of lie
If you have good measures of conscientiousness and IQ, you can predict someone's success in the competitive landscape with a correlation of about 0.6
To direct the market means to impose the heavy hand of the state and it's potential pathologies on the market but to leave it alone completely means that it wanders randomly through an indeterminate landscape
University is actually not a business. It's like a church is not a business
Men who are men don't need money, they need function
Economic inequality drives crime
Don't let the inequality in your neighborhood get out of hand because the crime rate will skyrocket
In order for society to progress you have to allow the individual to compete in a relatively untrammeled space so that they can innovate
Motivation driven by necessity
One of the advantages of zero is that you're driven by brute necessity and that can really be motivating. That's I think why the children of first generation immigrants often do so well. They're driven by necessity
If you don't have any money, it's really hard to get some. Once you have some, it's not so hard to get some more
Smart people who work hard are disproportionately likely to succeed
Biggest predictors of success
We know what predicts success - IQ and conscientiousness are the biggest predictors of success
If you let a monetary system run, all the money ends up in the hands of a very small number of people
If you put more effort and more time and focus into your work whatever it would be whether it's a podcast or your YouTube videos or whatever if people enjoy it they gravitate towards it and then over time it exponentially increases the amount of people that are exposed to it
When one good thing happens to you it makes you a little more powerful and attractive and so that fractionally increases the possibility that another good thing will happen to you
To those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken
If you took a hundred classical composers ten of them produce half the music that's played. And then if you take the ten composers and you take a thousand of their songs, thirty of those songs which is the square root of a thousand roughly speaking are played fifty percent of the time
If you have ten thousand people, a hundred of them have half the money