“Is it possible to build a successful business without great customer service? Yes. Absolutely. There are untold numbers of profitable businesses that resent and mistreat their customers. It’s up to you to decide if your company is going to make customer service a competitive advantage.

“Knowing the tool-du-jour is very different from knowing the structure of a large class of tools. The beauty of Scheme is that it has reified the structure of a truly huge range of tools into a fairly simple programming language.

“The development of Wikipedia’s organization [its increasing hierarchy] provides a benign case study in the political malignancy of crowds: people prefer a path toward ever more elaborate schemes of rule-making, at least when they become members of a large group.

“Don’t worry about the starting salary or the benefits package, because it will have no bearing at all on whether you are happy or rich in ten years time. All that matters is whether the work is sufficiently stimulating, and the network that comes with it sufficiently high-powered, to allow you to glimpse your own potential.

“Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. I think this difference is the single most under-appreciated fact about gender. To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like: throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.

We’re descended from women who played it safe. We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich.

“Culture (e.g., a country, a religion) is an abstract system that competes against rival systems [including counterfactuals]

“I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

“Most people engage in strategies with low volatility but high risk. Demand for certainty is an intellectual vice.

Be fooled in small matters, not in the large. Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

Lose small to make big. If you are in the military, in catastrophe insurance, or in banking and lending, or in homeland security, you face only downside. Examples of positive-Black Swan businesses are: movies, some segments of publishing, scientific research, and venture capital.

Living in cities is invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters. Diplomats understand this well: big breakthroughs come from casual chance discussions at cocktail parties, not dry correspondence or telephone conversations. Go to parties!

When you hear a ‘prominent’ economist use the word equilibrium or normal distribution, do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.

“When man disappears from the earth the only thing that misses us will be the head lice and the E. coli.

“The Human Genome Project set out on a 15-year quest to map the human genome. Nine years in, the project had only mapped about one percent. To linear thinkers this appeared to be a failure. But completing one percent of the map wasn’t the same as completing one percent of the TASK, which included developing the technology for efficient genome mapping. The project was actually completed ahead of schedule and under budget.