"Intellectual curiosity not only matters for the book choices of individuals, it is—more importantly—also essential for the progress of society. People who keep on learning every day are the ones who create new technologies by trial and error and make our lives better."

"how do we make people intellectual curious? We do not need to, they already are. More accurately, they used to be. You see this curiosity is in children. They are learning machines asking questions all day, trying to figure out everything."

"“Clear thinkers appeal to their own authority.” —Naval Ravikant"

"there is always room to improve our mental models of the world, and with them to improve our lives. In addition to that, once you have reasoned through an argumentation yourself an authority has no more power to change your mind than anyone else."

"There is a strong bias for being consistent with your past choices and opinions, which makes changing them even more challenging."

"An important counter-intuitive observation is that mental models do not keep increasing in complexity. Things get simpler after putting enough time and energy into understanding them. This is known as simplicity on the other side of complexity."

"“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn’t give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes"

"The main reason for this ever-increasing complexity of mental models is that memorization is treated as learning. Everyone is only adding new facts to their mental models, seldom subtracting any or building new and deep connections."

"In this race between broader knowledge and deeper explanations (how much one explanation can explain), depth seems to be coming out on top."

"Honest learning and understanding are not fostered, instead “hacking exams” is. Paul Graham wrote about this problem in “The lesson to Unlearn”: “But wasting your time is not the worst thing the educational system does to you. The worst thing it does is to train you that the way to win is by hacking bad tests.”"

"Schools and universities also take all the fun out of learning by forcing everyone to study a subject in a rigid and planned manner. This is an inevitable drawback of educating a lot of people in the same way—only limited space for individuality; as a result studying topics gets more difficult and boring. The solution is autodidacticism—learning things on your own."

"We live in an age where anyone with the desire to learn and access to the internet can learn anything for (almost) free. Previously the means for learning where scares, now it is only the desire."

"Now you get to decide which information is worth keeping and which is not. This skill—detecting a signal in all the noise of information and discarding everything else—is one of the most important skills to acquire in our modern information age. Ideally, you use boredom as your natural content filter, allowing yourself to only study what you are naturally interested in."

"We can use the Lindy effect to predict which subjects will survive. This effect says that for non-perishables things like ideas, books, technology, or music the expected lifetime increases with every day they survive."

"People are already able to learn anything they want on their own with very little or no cost. The possibilities of educating yourself on the internet will only increase. To take advantage of this shift in education, the only thing you need is intellectual curiosity—to see learning as something you do for fun in your “free time.”"