Below are some aphorisms I authored, inspired by Nassim's Taleb's book "The Bed of Procrustes". > Ideas become bad only in retrospect; in the spur of the moment, they're always rational and justified, even if it's just eating chocolate. > There are two categories of people; the ones who think there are two categories of people, and the rest. > Complexity is the refinement of imbeciles. > Most footwear has little to do with foot form. > Putting out fires at outrageous prices is far more profitable than selling cheap fire extinguishers. > Hospitals call people patients to their face, but clients when they're not in the room. > An egoist is someone who does not put me first. > One thing journalists have taught us is that it takes about 1.000 deaths on another continent to get the same level of attention a single one does in your own country. > Speaking a single language is like seeing reality in just one dimension. > Most courses are mere lists of topics. > Music's most essential component is the silence between the notes. > Historians are not practitioners; yet most experts belong to the first category. > How important can be the name of a ship that's sinking? > Bad language teachers delay practice and hide behind grammar. > Nobody would fight without trying to block their opponent's blows. Why treat other kinds of risk differently? > Why do people who go to the gym and those who help their friends move seem to be consistently different people? > Most animals I've met wear suits. > Not understanding a teacher does not equate lacking the ability to grok a topic. > You can remember definitions, or you can remember meaning; you can learn formulas, or you can learn how they are derived. > Most academic papers are produced to be published, not read. > Feed a lion every day and he'll eventually stop hunting. > Rare events aren’t rare enough. > Good universities excel at finding great students, not great teachers. > Getting a job used to be a way to learn and earn in order to bootstrap a life on your own terms. The goal was to do work that matters to you. Nowadays, getting a job seems to a goal in itself for most. >Recipes don't teach you how to cook, they teach you how to follow recipes. >Grades are supposed to be a proxy for you to understand how well you understood a subject. Now they've become everybody's goal and few actually try to understand what they're cramming through. >We worship heroes who died in battle, yet shame children in school for getting bad grades. >Some people buy expensive cars to be like the rich. The rich buy cheap cars. >Most writing is produced by deciding what to say, then gathering supporting evidence.