this is a mess

He wants to live forever, have the option to escape to outer space or an oceanic city-state, and play chess against a robot that can discuss Tolkien, because these were the fantasies that filled his childhood imagination.

The very long corridors of Bell Lab's flagship Murray Hill, NJ facility were deliberately designed to increase the chances that you would run into a colleague while wandering over to the cafeteria for lunch.

If you took away tests and grading systems, these kids would be desperately unhappy, because that’s how they’ve been trained all their lives to think about their self-worth.

You need to take a leap of faith that your native talents and desires will end you up at a reasonable and interesting place. Actually you don’t ever have to decide that, you could just keep doing what you think looks good to other people and pleases your parents or friends, without regard to whether it fulfills you at all. That’s kind of what’s happening I think with the 36% of the Princeton undergrads going to finance.

One fake vector of progress is credentialing—first the undergraduate degree, then more advanced degrees. Like the others, it’s an avoidance mechanism.

Properly understood, political correctness is our greatest political problem.