The virtuous worry about their integrity, lesser humans (say, academics) about their reputation. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept.

Know how to rank your beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

This confirmation problem pervades our modern life, since most conflicts have at their root the following mental bias: when Arabs and Israelis watch news reports they see different stories in the same succession of events. Likewise, Democrats and Republicans look at different parts of the same data and never converge to the same opinions. Once your mind is inhabited with a certain view of the world, you will tend to only consider instances proving you to be right. Paradoxically, the more information you have, the more justified you will feel in your views.