"As a matter of fact, your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call "positive effect", the… - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

good news is good news first; how good matters rather little. So to have a pleasant life you should spread these small “affects” across time as evenly as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of great news.

One conceivable way to discriminate between a scientific intellectual and a literary intellectual is by considering that a scientific intellectual can usually recognize the writing of another but that the literary intellectual would not be able to tell the difference between lines jotted down by a scientist and those by a glib nonscientist. This is even more apparent when the literary intellectual starts using scientific buzzwords, like “uncertainty principle,” “Godel’s theorem,” “parallel universe,” or “relativity,” either out of context or, as often, in exact opposition to the scientific meaning. I suggest reading the hilarious Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal for an illustration of such practice (I was laughing so loudly and so frequently while reading it on a plane that other passengers kept whispering things about me).

The opposite of "b**llshitter" isn't someone called "truthful" but someone called "arrogant".

LOCALISM,1 Governments come & go, bureaucrats stay. Ministries & agencies aren't run by ministers & transitory figureheads, but by a "deep local microstate" of civil servants who have been there for decades & "own" the inside. Worse: EPA was run by Monsanto, FAA by Boeing.