The best compliment to me is: you write with your scars. Everything else is verbiage. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In a few decades will we look upon the Nobel economics committee with the same smirk as when we look at the respected “scientific” establishments of the Middle Ages that promoted (against all observational evidence) the idea that the heart was a center of heat? We have been getting things wrong in the past and we laugh at our past institutions; it is time to figure out that we should avoid enshrining the present ones.

Different people rarely mean the same thing by religion. Nor do they realise it. For early Jews & Muslims, religion was law. 'Deen' is law in Hebrew, religion in Arabic.

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.