Quotes from Michael Lewis

I think, a profound ability to control the two emotions that commonly destroy traders (fear and greed) and it made him as noble as a man who pursues his self-interest so fiercely can be.

a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

No traditional Graham and Dodd investor invested in AOL," said a banker at the table. "They shorted it. And got fucked. They're learning the new model.

From there she moved naturally enough to the Centers for Disease Control, where she led a team seeking answers to basic questions about the overall health of the population. For instance, blood lead levels in children fell by a lot in the 1970s and early 1980s. This welcome development, they figured out, was due to the phasing out of leaded gasoline.

defied the odds;

No one ever asked Friedberg the question: If my knowledge is no longer useful, who needs me? But it was a good question. "There is stuff the farmer picks up on that we haven't got data on yet," he said. "For example, are there bugs in the field? But over time

In 2016 the DOE counted half a million cyber-intrusions into various parts of the U.S. electrical grid.

that'll go to zero. Everything will be observed. Everything will be predicted.

No one wanted to get in a fight with Amos, said the psychologist Irv Beaterman. Not in public. I only once ever say anyone do it. It was this philosopher at a conference. He gets up to give his talk. He's going to challenge heuristics. Amos was there. When he finished talking, Amos got up to rebut. It was like an ISIS beheading but with humour.

By law the life-insurance companies were not required to pay on deaths caused by earthquakes. But in Japan the law often comes second–in 1923 the insurance companies were ordered to pay money they didn't owe. In a crisis no Japanese company is really private; the insurance companies have been effectively nationalized. They have been told to pay whatever they can without depleting their domestic-securities portfolios. It is their peculiar charm that they don't argue.

All around him men hunched over their BlackBerrys. They wanted

The model he'd built with his daughter showed that there was no difference between giving a person a vaccine and removing him or her from the social network: in each case, a person lost the ability to infect others.

There was no vaccine in sight; and the number of infections required to achieve herd immunity could be calculated, as it was a simple function of the reproductive rate. (The formula was 1 ? 1/R0, where R0 was the reproduction number.)

No doubt the Home of the Future was only one of several possible uses Clark would find for their work. That was Clark's job—to imagine a future for their software.

Things went so well for him so often that no one ever needed to worry about how he behaved when they didn't go well.

Her receptors were just very keen," said Pontes, "and she processes information fast and it spits out decisions and it makes people get nervous.

The difference between being very smart and very foolish is often very small.

The first SARS outbreak had ended because those infected had been isolated quickly and prevented from infecting others. Those capable of infecting others were easy to identify because they were so obviously ill. There were few, if any, asymptomatic spreaders.

Who cares what other people think?" says Alexander. "It's not their team.") In

people don't learn what is imposed upon them but rather what they freely seek, out of desire or need. For people to learn, they need to want to learn.

After all, what is a marriage if not an agreement to distort one's perception of another, in relation to everyone else? "I

Really, it's brilliant what they have done within the bounds of the regulation. They are much less of a villain than I thought. The system has let down the investor.

The soviet-controlled economy was horrible and complicated but riddled with loopholes. Everything was scarce; everything was also gettable, if you knew how to get it. We had this system for seventy years said Constantine. People learn to work around the system. The more you cultivate a class of people qho know how to work around the system, the more people you will have qho know how to do it well. All of the Soviet Union for seventy years were people who skilled at working around the system

He had a diffidence about him—an understanding of how hard it is to know anything for sure. The closest he came to certainty was in his approach to making decisions. He never simply went with his first thought. He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.