Academics think in very low-resolution digital while humans see things in analog. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all.

Those who use foul language on social networks (such as Twitter) are sending an expensive signal that they are free — and, ironically, competent. You don’t signal competence if you don’t take risks for it — there are few such low-risk strategies. So cursing today is a status symbol, just as oligarchs in Moscow wear blue jeans at special events to signal their power.

"It would appear to a quoting dilettante — i.e., one of those writers and scholars who fill up their texts with phrases from some dead authority — that, as phrased by Hobbes, “from like antecedents flow like consequents.” Those who believe in the unconditional benefits of past experience should consider this pearl of wisdom allegedly voiced by a famous ship’s captain:

"But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident… of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort." E. J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS

Titanic Captain Smith’s ship sank in 1912 in what became the most talked-about shipwreck in history."