Speed matters.

— James Somers and Jamie Brandon

There’s no speed limit.

— Derek Sivers

You don’t need to work on hard problems.

— Ben Kuhn

But I know I had a growing feeling in the later years of my work at the subject that a good mathematical theorem dealing with economic hypotheses was very unlikely to be good economics: and I went more and more on the rules —

  1. Use mathematics as a short-hand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry.

  2. Keep to them till you have done.

  3. Translate into English.

  4. Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life.

  5. Burn the mathematics.

  6. If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3.

  7. This last I did often.

— Alfred Marshall

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

— EF Schumacher

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

— probably not Leonardo da Vinci

Cooking professionally is hard work. Writing is a privilege and a luxury. Anybody who whines about writer’s block should be forced to clean squid all day.

— Anthony Bourdain

Read.

— Byrne Hobart

Computers can be understood.

— Nelson Elhage

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.

— The Zen of Python

Look before you leap.

— not the Zen of Python

The students of this lab had a strong sense of conviction that the best science was created via intellectual arbitrage — scouring lesser-known papers and, if something worthwhile turned up that had been already de-risked, pushing it further.

— Abhishaike Mahajan

Nobody reads the paper.

— an AI lab researcher I met

Find hungry samurai.

— Gisaku in Seven Samurai