• Don't give me your opinion show me your portfolio: the best advice is what people are actually doing in practice, not what they are saying you should do.
• People make the best decisions when they have a stake in its outcome.
• Hannurabi's tablet: old (babylonian?) tablet with the rules of commerce, placed in the town square so everyone knows the law or can have it read to them.
• Interventionists cause problems in other countries since they decide to intervene but do not participate in the fighting and do not live with the consequences of their policies.
• Pilot story: incompetent pilots may take risks they don't understand, but will also join in the casualties and so do not propagate
• Do no harm: those who take no risks should not make the decisions.
• Traditional nobility: taking risk of harm to protect others.
• If responsibility is not decentralized, a system will eventually explode.
• Government makes corruption possible.
• Cannot convince someone they are wrong; only reality can.
• Caution against problems only an architect can detect, and will be long gone by the time the problem hits.
• Acting by removal is more powerful than acting by addition.
• Virtue ethics as applying symmetry to relations between individuals.
• When the people taking risks don't pay for them (Bankers) hidden risks will continue until systemic collapse.
• Fools of randomness are purged by nature.
• Those who talk should do; only those who do should talk.
• Stage lights shining on to speakers distracts them.
• Scholars make things more complicated than necessary.
• Designs by people with no skin in the game grow in complexity until collapse.
• "Mental nimbleness of a cauliflower."
• Common law is about the spirit of the law, Regulation is about the letter.
• Deontological libertarianism: The freedom to make mistakes that harm only yourself.
• When people transact they prefer Commonwealths.
• It is dishonorable to allow others to die for you.
• Bob Rubin trade: privatize the profits, socialize the losses; pass the risk of a bad trade on to the public.
• Laws change, ethics don't.
• Companies hate tort law because it places their skin back in the game.
• It is more important that tribes cooperate than all tribes be conjoined in to one.
• Ostrom: communities below particular sizes act as a commons.
• Rhodian Law: if goods must be thrown overboard for the good of all, the cost is equally suffered by all.
• Margaret Mead: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
• Generalizing interactions between people only works if there are no asymmetries.
• Thomas Schelling: cellular automata, demonstrating segregation can occur without a single segregationist.
• Dhananjay Gode, Shyam Sunder, Friedrich Hayek: a market consisting only of agents who buy and sell randomly seem to have no more efficiency than "intelligent" markets.
• Giving people something to lose if they disobey authority.
• Whistleblowers: time may eventually vindicate the whistleblower, but it takes much effort to reach through noise created by corporate shills. And the whistleblower is unemployable while they wait.
• Ethical decisions require no dilemma between the particular and the general.
• Cato's injunction: asking why someone does not have a statue instead of why they do.
• Intellectual Yet Idiots do not detect sophistry.
• Dynamic equality: requiring those who hold the highest seats to rotate; or to the possibility of openings being created.
• Negative empiricism: only a small amount of significant data is needed to disprove a hypothesis.
• Periander of Corinth: use laws that are old but food that is fresh.
• Non risk takers do not understand other people are not like them.
• Take as much as you can; but give more than you take.
• Ennius, Cicero: The good is not as good as the absense of bad.
• The successful misfit has conquered more opposition.
• Entrepeneur firms make their money by packaging and selling businesses.
• High bullshit fields: importance of paper is based on prestige of journal. Low bullshit fields: papers go in archival sites.

Dealing with minorities

• Minority rule: when masses who don't care capitulate/appease an intolerant minority. When ~5% of a diffused population becomes an intolerant minority the entire society has to capitulate to it.
• Renormalization groups
• Fractal self-similarity: a small tribe has its own intolerant minority which is appeased, which means the entire tribe appeases, and when enough tribes appease the whole clan appeases, in a recursive way.
• Minority veto: McDonalds survives not through quality, but by being vetoed by the least amount of minorities.
• "Once you have 10% or more women at a party, you cannot serve only beer. But most men will drink wine."

Philosophies of disclosure

• Diogenes: seller should disclose only what the law requires.
• Antipater: seller should disclose everything such that he knows nothing more than the buyer does.