The advantages of flexibility

Flexibility is valuable in almost any aspect of life – in school, on the job, in intimate relations with other people, and even in dealing with oneself. Just think of how much more effective teachers could be if they accommodated themselves to the varied styles of thinking in their classrooms, or how easy it would be to work for people who allowed us to be ourselves and to get our work done in ways that are effective for us, or how enjoyable it would be to be in a relationship with someone who fully appreciated us for ourselves – for our own likes and dislikes – rather than for what they would like us to be. The advantages of flexibility are so overwhelming that one wonders why we don’t emphasize it much more than we do in our teaching of our children, our students, and our employees. 

Robert Sternberg, Thinking Styles

The Madman’s Narrative

Consider that two people can hold incompatible beliefs based on the exact same data. Does this mean that there are possible families of explanations and that each of these can be equally perfect and sound? Certainly not. One may have a million ways to explain things, but the true explanation is unique, whether or not it is within our reach. 

In a famous argument, the logician WV Quine showed that there exist families of logically consistent interpretations and theories that can match a give series of facts. Such insight should warn us that mere absence of nonsense may not be sufficient to make something true. 

Nassim Taleb, The Black Swain

Drinking bacon grease for breakfast

If you seek advice from a very old person about how to become very old, the only person who can provide you an answer is a person who is not dead. The people who made the poor health choices you should avoid are now resting in the earth and can’t tell you about those bad choices anymore. That’s why it’s difficult not to furrow your brow and wonder why you keep paying for a gym membership when Willard Scott showcases the birthday of a 110-year-old woman who claims the source of her longevity is a daily regimen of cigarillos, cheese sticks, and Wild Turkey cut with maple syrup and Robitussin. You miss that people like her represent a very small number of the living. They are on the thin end of a bell curve. There is a much larger pool of people who basically drank bacon grease for breakfast and didn’t live long enough to appear on television. Most people can’t chug bourbon and gravy for a lifetime and expect to become an octogenarian, but the unusually lucky handful who can tend to stand out precisely because they are alive and talking.

David McRaney, You are not so Smart