A playground is a great place to be a bully, and a terrible place to be a victim, if the teachers don’t care who started it.

I’ve seen people severely messed up by their own knowledge of biases. They have more ammunition with which to argue against anything they don’t like. And that problem – too much ready ammunition – is one of the primary ways that people with high mental agility end up stupid, in Stanovich’s “dysrationalia” sense of stupidity.

The truly important problems are often the ones you’re not even considering, because they appear to be impossible, or, um, actually difficult, or worst of all, not clear how to solve.

As you would be kind to others, be kinder to yourself as well.

The point of thinking is to shape our plans; if you’re going to keep the same plans anyway, why bother going to all that work to justify it? When.

You’d think there’d be some kind of more dramatic mental event associated with updating on an observation of infinitesimal probability -” Harry stopped himself. Mum, the witch, and even his Dad were giving him that look again. “I mean, with finding out that everything I believe is false.

It wasn’t cheating, but it was Science, which was almost as good.

Do not think that heroes cannot be broken! We are only more difficult to break, Hermione.” The old wizard’s eyes had grown sterner than she had ever seen. “When you have been exhausted for many hours, when pain and death is not a passing fear but a certainty, then it is harder to be a hero.

The golden coins might have been his, but they were still stolen – self-stolen? Auto-thieved?

You cannot obtain more truth for a fixed proposition by arguing it. To improve our beliefs, we must necessarily change our beliefs.