Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes

For me, my greatest weakness is also my greatest strength: I'm a complete overthinker about everything.

Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use.

To someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values. That is to say, their own ideas and other people's values.

It's actually very surprising how little we think about the quality of our decision-making and how we could improve it. How absent decision-making classes are from educational curricula. How little we think about how it is we think.

The best types of problems are those that seem harder at first than when you think about it.

When there is a problem, always identify and evaluate your underlying assumptions that may be contributing to the problem or preventing you from seeing the problem clearly.

I've always felt some kind of connection to people who are kind of over-smart. People who over-think things to the point of some sort of paralysis, and I think that certainly can be me on any given day.

We mostly feel fearful because we feel powerless. We feel powerless, I contend, because of a style of thinking that splits information in two poles that makes us lose all the operative information we need to solve the problem.

Just because we have the best hammer, does not mean that every problem is a nail.

One of the biggest challenges we have, as business owners and people, is that we think in linear terms.

Ironically, when a bunch of very smart people are sitting around a table for hours trying to figure out whether they should do something, that tends to not necessarily lead to the best results.

I have always tended to over-think things and that had come into my game. That's good in certain moments but not when you have to make a quick decision.

There's a human element here you start to lose when you start rattling off the best mathematical equation to get the out.

Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

What's the use of inventing a better system as long as there just aren't enough folks with sense to go around?

When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails.

As the saying goes, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Reason and the ability to use it are two separate skills.

To me, it doesn't matter if your scapegoats are the Jews, the homosexuals, the male sex, the Masons, the Jesuits, the Welfare Parasites, the Power Elite, the female sex, the vegetarians, or the Communist Party. To the extent that you need a scapegoat, you simply have not got your brain programmed to work as an efficient problem-solving machine.

You're mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid. You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation at high speed with total clarity.

Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created

We seem to have trouble with [critical thinking]. And our political system doesn't help.