Quotes About Social

Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the normal, particularly with bell curve methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud.

Those who use foul language on social networks (such as Twitter) are sending an expensive signal that they are free—and, ironically, competent. You don't signal competence if you don't take risks for it—there are few such low-risk strategies. So cursing today is a status symbol, just as oligarchs in Moscow wear blue jeans at special events to signal their power.

We are social animals; hell is other people.

social treadmill effect: You get rich, move to rich neighborhoods, then become poor again. To that add the psychological treadmill effect; you get used to wealth and revert to a set point of satisfaction. This problem of some people never really getting to feel satisfied by wealth (beyond a given point) has been the subject of technical discussions on happiness.

The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention.

Paradoxically, many government interventions and social policies end up hurting the weak and consolidating the established.

We are fragilizing social and economic systems by denying them stressors and randomness, putting them in the Procrustean bed of cushy and comfortable—but ultimately harmful—modernity.

Charlatan" was held to be a synonym for empirick. The word "empiric" designated someone who relied on experiment and experience to ascertain what was correct. In other words, trial and error and tinkering. That was held to be inferior—professionally, socially, and intellectually. It is still not considered to be very "intelligent.

envy is something you are more likely to encounter in your own kin: lower classes are more likely to experience envy toward their cousins or the middle class than toward the very rich.

People have difficulty realizing that the solution is building a system in which nobody's fall can drag others down—for continuous failures work to preserve the system. Paradoxically, many government interventions and social policies end up hurting the weak and consolidating the established.

The optimal solution to being independent and upright while remaining a social animal is: to seek first your own self-respect and, secondarily and conditionally, that of others, provided your external image does not conflict with your own self-respect. Most people get it backwards and seek the admiration of the collective and something called "a good reputation" at the expense of self-worth for, alas, the two are in frequent conflict under modernity.

I discovered the magic of the camera in reestablishing civil/ethical behavior as follows.

Web-shaming is much more powerful than past reputational blots, and more of a tail risk.

more suicides come from shame or loss of financial and social status than medical diagnoses.

Aside from the misperception of one's performance, there is a social treadmill effect: You get rich, move to rich neighborhoods, then become poor again. To that add the psychological treadmill effect; you get used to wealth and revert to a set point of satisfaction. This problem of some people never really getting to feel satisfied by wealth (beyond a given point) has been the subject of technical discussions on happiness.

in the long term, social and economic evolution nastily takes place by surprises, discontinuities, and jumps.

it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.

Many are forced by peer and social pressures to do so

It was calculated that actors who win an Oscar tend to live on average about five years longer than their peers who don't. People live longer in societies that have flatter social gradients. Winners kill their peers as those in a steep social gradient live shorter lives, regardless of their economic condition.

I send out signals and behave in ways that increase the likelihood that others will respond appropriately.

Nevertheless, in spite of all these professional grudges, artists are conscious of a social warmth from each other's presence and contiguity. They shiver at the remembrance of their lonely studios in the unsympathizing cities of their native land. For the sake of such brotherhood as they can find, more than for any good that they get from galleries, they linger year after year in Italy, while their originality dies out of them, or is polished away as a barbarism.

Ella era la clase de chica que participaba, mientras que Rowan era la clase de chico que evitaba a los demás.

player had put in her armor. Her well-crafted social veneer

You seemed to be awfully friendly with one of the party boys. Should I invite more of them for you next time?" "No, no, it's nothing like that," said Rowan, blushing in spite of himself. "He's just a friend from home.