Quotes

Life is not a championship. Life is a whole bunch of championships. It's a whole sequence of them

Life is not a game, even a game is not a game. Because most of the time game is the beginning of a series of games.
Let's say that you're on a soccer team. Winning a championship and winning a game are not the same thing. If you want to win a game the best thing to do is to let your star player make all the moves. But if you want to win a championship maybe the best thing is for your star player to do everything he or she possibly can to develop all the other team members. That's a different strategy and the reason it's different is because it iterates across time

"everything you do dear is okay" - that's the terrible devouring mother from a psychoanalytic perspective. No! It's not okay!

Hierarchies are complex tools to attain necessary goals but they dispossess people

Low IQ is good predictor of poverty

Low IQ is good predictor of poverty. If you are less cognitively gifted, and you have children, they are going to be in a less enriched environment. These things spiral

One way to not do very well in any hierarchy is to have a low IQ. If you have an IQ of less than 85 it's hard for you to read well enough to follow instructions. that's about 10% of the population. Might even be higher than that

You have to pursue things of value. If you do it with other people cooperatively and competitively, then you are going to produce differential outcome because people will be differently good at it

Between 2000 and 2012 the rate of absolute poverty in the world fell by half. It was the fastest period of economic development in human history

The distribution of the idea of individual sovereignty and property rights and free market economies out into the non-western world is making the non-western world rich really really really fast

No matter what you are acting out some people are way better at it than others. Doesn't matter if it's basketball or hockey or plumbing or law it doesn't matter. As soon as there is something valuable and you are doing it collectively there is a hierarchy

I certainly believe that there is space and necessity for a constant dialogue between the left and the right

Equality of outcome is an absolutely deadly doctrine.
Equity doctrine is at the top of the list of radical left mistakes

If you are radically left and you are playing the identity politics game there is actually no such thing as free speech because you are only the mouthpiece of your group whether you know it or not

I do believe that especially for the radical leftist types the whole notion of free speech among individuals is not only anathema but also something that is not possible within their framework of reference

You think but you can only remember so much

You think but you can only remember so much. You have to write it down because then you can remember way more

Whatever they are, ignorant superstition is not a right category

Aim at heaven!

Aim at heaven!
Start at home!
Tell the truth!
Let's see what the hell happens

We are not going to run out of potential

There is more to you than you think, there is more than enough potential to go around. There is definite suffering and malevolence in the world. We could fix it. You haven't got anything better to do

Maybe all you have is this little rat hole of a room in some run-down place in the world. Fix it up! There is more there than you think. See what happens if you fix it up. And you'll fix yourself up simultaneously because you have to get disciplined in order to fix up the room. Then you have a fixed-up room and you will be a more fixed-up person. All hell will break loose as a consequence of that

Everything around you is full of potential. Everything! Maybe more potential than you could ever possibly utilize

It's not that easy to cleanup your room. You want your room to be set up so that when you walk in there it tells you to be better than you generally are. It's organized, it has got direction, everything is in its place. You try to do that in your chaotic household

When you do something that you should not do, it's worse than you think and when you do something that you should do, it's better than you think

Your family is more messed up than it could be, if you were less messed up than you are. So if you just got your act together like ten percent more your family would be one percent better.
Do it!