[quotes] Zero to One - Peter Thiel 2014

 

"Google's motto - 'Don't be evil' - is in part a branding ploy, but it's also characteristic of a kind of business that's successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence."

"In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything."

"Then monopolies can keep innovating because profits enable them to make the long-term plans and to finance the ambitious research projects that firms locked in competition can't dream of."

"As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage."

"Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small. The reason is simple: it's easier to dominate a small market than a large one. If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is."

"As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don't disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible."

"A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random."

"In 1906, economic Vilfredo Pareto discovered what became the 'Pareto principle,' or the 80-20 rule, when he noticed that 20% of the people owned 80% of the land in Italy - a phenomenon that he found just as natural as the fact that 20% of the peapods in his garden produced 80% of the peas... And monopoly businesses capture more value than millions of undifferentiated competitors."

"Anyone who prefers owning a part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company's value in the future. Equity can't create perfect incentives, but it's the best way for a founder to keep everyone in the company broadly aligned."

"A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside."

"Just cover the basics like health insurance and then promise what no others can: the opportunity to do irreplaceable work on a unique problem alongside great people. You probably can't be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team."

"Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure."

"The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete."

"Progress isn't held back by some difference between corporate greed and nonprofit goodness; instead, we're held back by the sameness of both. Just as corporations tend to copy each other, nonprofits all tend to push the same priorities."

"Doing something different is what's truly good for society - and it's also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market. The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve."

"Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company."

"Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better - to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future."

[quotes] The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander 2010

 

"Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns."

"The colorblind public consensus that prevails in America today - i.e., the widespread belief that race no longer matters - has blinded us to the realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system."

"Following the collapse of each system of control, there has been a period of confusion - transition - in which those who are most committed to racial hierarchy search for new means to achieve their goals within the rules of the game as currently defined."

"Competing images of the poor as 'deserving' and 'undeserving' became central components of the debate. Ultimately, the racialized nature of this imagery became a crucial resource for conservatives, who succeeded in using law and order rhetoric in their effort to mobilize the resentment of white working-class voters, many of whom felt threatened by the sudden progress of African Americans."

"Condemning 'welfare queens' and criminal 'predators,' he rode into office with the strong support of disaffected whites - poor and working-class whites who felt betrayed by the Democratic Party's embrace of the civil rights agenda."

"... the president signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 into law. Among other harsh penalties, the legislation included mandatory minimum sentences for the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for distribution for crack - associated with blacks - than powder cocaine, associated with whites."

"The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism."

"Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born."

"Relatively little organized opposition to the drug war currently exists, and any dramatic effort to scale back the war may be publicly condemned as 'soft' on crime. The war has become institutionalized. It is no longer a special program or politicized project; it is simply the way things are done."

"Racial discrimination, the Court seemed to suggest, was something that simply must be tolerated in the criminal justice system, provided no one admits to racial bias."

"... the impact of the biased treatment is magnified with each additional step into the criminal justice system. African American youth account for 16 percent of all youth, 28 percent of all juvenile arrests, 35 percent of the youth waived to adult criminal court, and 58 percent of youth admitted to state adult prison. A major reason for these disparities is unconscious and conscious racial biases infecting decision making."

"A hundreds years ago, our nation put those considered less than human in shackles; less than one hundred years ago, we relegated them to the other side of town; today we put them in cages. Once released, they find that a heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon them."

"They don't have to call you a nigger anymore. They just say you're a felon."

"The notion that ghetto families do not, in fact, want those things, and instead are perfectly content to live in crime-ridden communities, feeling no shame or regret about the fate of their young men is, quite simply, racist. It is impossible to imagine that we would believe such a thing about whites."

"If we had actually learned to show love, care, compassion, and concern across racial lines during the Civil Rights Movement - rather than go colorblind - mass incarceration would not exist today."

"The widespread and mistaken belief that racial animus is necessary for the creation and maintenance of racialized systems of social control is the most important reason that we, as a nation, have remained in deep denial."

"Under the usual-residence rule, the Census Bureau counts imprisoned individuals as residents of the jurisdiction in which they are incarcerated. Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which the prisoners come."

"... white ex-offenders may actually have an easier time gaining employment than African Americans without a criminal record. To be a black man is to be thought of as a criminal, and to be a black criminal is to be despicable - a social pariah."

"At its core, then, mass incarceration, like Jim Crow, is a 'race-making institution.' It serves to define the meaning and significance of race in America."

"Laws that said nothing about race operated to discriminate because those charged with enforcement were granted tremendous discretion, and they exercised that discretion in a highly discriminatory manner."

"This system of control depends far more on racial indifference (defined as a lack of compassion and caring about race and racial groups) than racial hostility - a feature it actually shares with its predecessors."

"It is fair to say that we have witnessed an evolution in the United States from a racial caste system based entirely on exploitation (slavery), to one based largely on subordination (Jim Crow), to one defined by marginalization (mass incarceration)."

"The colorblindness ideal is premised on the notion that we, as a society, can never be trusted to see race and treat each other fairly or with genuine compassion. A commitment to color consciousness, by contrast, places faith in our capacity as humans to show care and concern for others, even as we are fully cognizant of race and possible racial differences."

"We should hope not for a colorblind society but instead for a world in which we can see each other fully, learn from each other, and do what we can to respond to each other with love. That was King's dream - a society that is capable of seeing each of us, as we are, with love. That is a goal worth fighting for."

"Black success stories tend to credence to the notion that anyone, no matter how poor or how black you may be, can make it to the top, if only you try hard enough. These stories 'prove' that race is no longer relevant. Whereas black success stories undermine the logic of Jim Crow, they actually reinforce the system of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration depends for its legitimacy on the widespread belief that all those who appear trapped at the bottom actually chose their fate."

"People of color, because of the history of racial subjugation and exclusion, often experience success and failure vicariously through the few who achieve positions of power, fame, and fortune."

"Perhaps the time has come to give up the racial bribes and begin an honest conversation about race in America. The topic of the conversation should be how us can include all of us."

[quotes] Naked Statistics - Charles Wheelan 2013

 

"It's easy to lie with statistics, but it's hard to tell the truth without them."

"The real problem is that the average income in America is not equal to the income of the average American."

"The Democrats, who engineered this tax increase, pointed out (correctly) that the state income tax rate was increased by 2 percentage points (from 3 percent to 5 percent). The Republicans pointed out (also correctly) that the state income tax had been raised by 67 percent."

"The key lesson is to pay attention to the unit of analysis. Who or what is being described, and is that different from the 'who' or 'what' being described by someone else?"

"Nominal figures are not adjusted for inflation. A comparison of the nominal cost of a government program in 1970 to the nominal cost of the same program in 2011 merely compares the size of the checks that the Treasury wrote in those two years - without any recognition that a dollar in 1970 bought more stuff than a dollar in 2011."

"There is a common business aphorism: 'You can't manage what you can't measure.' True But you had better be darn sure that what you are measuring is really what you are trying to manage."

"But you had better be darn certain that the folks being evaluated can't make themselves look better (statistically) in ways that are not consistent with the goal at hand."

"When you solicit public opinion, the phrasing of the question and the choice of language can matter enormously."

"According to this research, it is not the stress associated with major responsibilities that will kill you; it is the stress associated with being told what to do while having little say in how or when it gets done."

"The problem is that the mechanics of regression analysis are not the hard part; the hard part is determining which variables ought to be considered in the analysis and how that can best be done. Regression analysis is like one of those fancy power tools. It is relatively easy to use, but hard to use well - and potentially dangerous when used improperly."

"An association between two variables is like a fingerprint at the scene of the crime. It points us in the right direction, but it's rarely enough to convict. (And sometimes a fingerprint at the scene of a crime doesn't belong to the perpetrator.) Any regression analysis needs a theoretical underpinning. Why are the explanatory variables in the equation? What phenomena from other disciplines can explain the observed results?"

"In the case of a randomized, controlled experiment, the control group is the counterfactual. In cases where a controlled experiment is impractical or immoral, we need to find some other way of approximating the counterfactual. Our understanding of the world depends on finding clever ways to do that."

[quotes] The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu 2006 (trans. Ken Liu 2014)

 

"The abbot shook his head and said, 'No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.'"

"Does it represent the yearning for order, or the surrender to chaos?"

"We can have no sea birds, but we can't be without oil. Can you imagine life without oil?"

"These are the rules of the game of civilization: The first priority is to guarantee the existence of the human race and their comfortable life. Everything else is secondary."

"'I don't care if this is meaningless. I can't stop. If I stop I'll fall apart.' Evans cut down a crooked branch with a practiced swing."

"A society with such advanced science must also have more advanced moral standards."