Venkatesh G. Rao Quotes & Sayings

Reflection is a dangerous pastime. It can lead you to rewrite your past, alter how you see your present, and tempt you down paths you never imagined you would explore. — Venkatesh G. Rao

So revenge is obviously a deeply messed-up expression of vindictiveness. It is hard to even call it "evil." It is just plain insanity. A result of deeply messed-up thinking. — Venkatesh G. Rao

learning helps us increase our store of usable information and lower risk. — Venkatesh G. Rao

Most people recognize that many blue-collar jobs pay more than white-collar jobs. Few act on that recognition. — Venkatesh G. Rao

for every complex question, there is an answer that is simple, elegant and wrong. — Venkatesh G. Rao

To be slightly evil is to embrace life. — Venkatesh G. Rao

beliefs create or constrain possibilities, desires lead to preferences among them, and intentions represent commitments to specific courses of action. Each of the primitive elements can evolve in time, which is why mental models have momentum. — Venkatesh G. Rao

So endgames are naturally messy.

They may not be very dynamic, but when an active war is shutting down, there is still a lot of cleaning up to do. It may sound grim, but that's what it looks like. There are broken things everywhere, wounds and corpses, general messiness. Things collapsing due to zemblanity forces that have been set in motion but are too large to control. — Venkatesh G. Rao

truth is also about increasing moral minimalism. As you learn more, you should have less need for moral opinions. Or — Venkatesh G. Rao

Your terrain is the tortuous maze of truth-avoidance paths worn out by the "be somebody" types, and paved by the medal-awarding priests. Your mission is to tackle head-on, the truths that they work hard to avoid. Your own twists and turns are about avoiding or outmaneuvering those who want to deny truths and defend obvious falsehoods. — Venkatesh G. Rao

Your most stable beliefs, the ones that actually modulate your behavior, aren't about life purposes; they are about momentum management. You are more likely to switch religions than to switch from an impatient to a patient temperament. — Venkatesh G. Rao

As writers like to remark, books are never finished, they are merely abandoned. This acceptance of necessary expediency leads to the increasing doubt and anxiety characteristic of the last hours before the first significant encounter with reality: the separation event. — Venkatesh G. Rao

The process of planning is very valuable, for forcing you to think hard about what you are doing, but the actual plan that results from it is probably useless. — Venkatesh G. Rao

What critics miss, however, is that there is no such thing as non-narrative thought, free of possible worlds and ongoing enactments. There are always multiple narratives at work, framing our perceptions, memories, active thoughts, decisions and actions. — Venkatesh G. Rao