When failure is expensive, it’s worth investing in large margins of safety. - Shane Parrish

Understanding is not enough However, understanding reality is not everything. The pursuit of understanding fuels meaning and adaptation, but this understanding, by itself, is not enough. Understanding only becomes useful when we adjust our behavior and actions accordingly

if you can’t prove something wrong, you can’t really prove it right either.

Hanlon’s Razor, when practiced diligently as a counter to confirmation bias, empowers us, and gives us far more realistic and effective options for remedying bad situations. When we assume someone is out to get us, our very natural instinct is to take actions to defend ourselves. It’s harder to take advantage of, or even see, opportunities while in this defensive mode because our priority is saving ourselves — which tends to reduce our vision to dealing with the perceived threat instead of examining the bigger picture.