It’s easy to make a simple system complex; it’s pretty much impossible to make a complex system simple. All of us live in a world of contracts and lawyers — and the financial system much more than most. Financial regulation will become simpler the day that contracts become shorter and easier to understand, which is to say, never.

How has the financial-services sector managed to make an ever-greater proportion of total profits over time? By extracting rents from complexity… So while banks opposed Basel III, at least they got increased complexity out of it, which means that the barriers to entry in the industry were raised.

Every gram of illicit marijuana currently on the street silently screams the lamentations of innocent blood; its smoke currently rises as unintended incense to the god of Chaos. I take back my earlier assertion about marijuana not destroying lives, but only because the supply chain is scuttled underground, and all means of regulation tend to have either blades or triggers.

The announcement yesterday by Chief Minister Katy Gallagher to establish a needle exchange in the ACT’s Alexander Maconochie Prison is historic. Politicians need votes like the rest of us need oxygen. And they know that there are no votes in prisons. But prisoners are a major concern for public health and human rights.

Despite prison authorities all over the world doing everything in their power to stop drugs entering prisons, they still get in. And they always will. Charles Manson, the most closely-guarded prisoner in the Western world, was still able to obtain illicit drugs behind bars.

The right to have a view is indeed equally shared, but this is does not imply the same for the idea itself. If all ideas are equal, then all ideas are worthless…

[Ideas] should be subject to critical scrutiny and survive only though articulation and argumentation. The point is, ideas are not people. And people are not just their ideas…

To assume that an idea may not be questioned because it is a part of your identity, and that an attack on it is an attack on you, equivalent to a denial of human respect, is a fallacy, and I name it here the “Fallacy of Deepest Offence” (a variety of the strawman fallacy).

It is a blurring of the line between people and ideas. It is a device by which ideas are rendered immune to critical inquiry.

If you want to believe that the world is made of snow, that women are inferior to men or that homosexuality is morally wrong then go ahead. But the instant you take that belief into the public arena, your ideas will be rightfully tested.

The minute you suggest others should believe it too, you will be challenged. When you ask that the taxes of your fellow citizens support your beliefs, you will be resisted. This is exactly how an open society operates and should operate. You are not immune because you are sincere.

It’s been suggested that, given the seriousness of climate change, we ought to adopt something like China’s one child policy. There was a group of doctors in Britain who recently advocated a two-child maximum. But at the end of the day those are crude prescriptions—-what we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that’s the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says “you can only have one or two children.” A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.

One of the most common complaints about a [story] is that it “doesn’t have a second act.” When people are disappointed, it’s usually not because the first act wasn’t good because the first act is the build-up… Nothing gets people to lean forward in their seats as much as, “let me tell you a story.” That’s the promise of something in front of you. “Come with me” is much more exciting as “here it is.

Interesting art allows you an obvious entry point, but doesn’t necessarily give you an easy exit.

We need oblique approaches [to our goals] because we live in a world where our capacity for abstraction is limited, where our knowledge of our goals is achieved incrementally, and in which the world is characterised by an irresolvable uncertainty. In world’s that are characterised in these ways, prcesses of adaptation - evolutionary processes - are generally more effective than attempts to design and plan our way through…

Evolution/adaptation is smarter than we are… Through the process evolution and adaption you could actually construct things that are more complicated than any human intelligence could ever conceive of… That is how complex watches have been constructed. They are not the products of some original design. They’re actually the products of centuries of adaptation through the processes of watchmaking.

Hubris. Hubris. If you only think about your own business, you think, “I’ve got a good story department, I’ve got a good marketing department, we’re going to go out and do this.” and you don’t think that everybody else is thinking the same way. In a given weekend in a year you’ll have five movies open, and there’s certainly not enough people to go around.

It is the capacity for maintenance that is the best test for the vigour and stamina of a society. Any society can galvanise for a while to build something, but the will and the skill to keep things in good repair, day in and day out, are fairly rare.

Trust is the ultimate shortcut to a buying decision…

[T]he next time you go to a computer superstore, go to the voice recognition software shelf and pick up a box there that’s called the IBM ViaVoice. Now don’t buy it, but just look at it! They have a picture of the customer on the box, and it’s an administrative assistant who is sitting in front of her computer wearing a headset speaking rather than word processing.

You think about the value proposition that IBM has to be making to this woman. She types 90 words a minute. She is 99% accurate. If she needs to capitalize something, she just instinctively presses shift and cruises through. And IBM has to say, “No, don’t do that anymore. I want you to put this headset on and teach yourself to speak in a slow and distinct and consistent manner in complete sentences. If you must capitalize, you must pause, speak the command “capitalize,” pause, speak the word you want to capitalize, pause, speak the command “uncapitalize,” pause, please be patient, we are 70% accurate, this will get better we promise.”

Organisations face the challenge of controlling the tendency of executives competing for resources to present overly optimistic plans. A well-run organisation will reward planners for precise execution and penalise them for failing to anticipate difficulties…

When goods were scarce and people bought what they could get, it was hardly necessary to understand consumer psychology. But in an age of prosperity, when supply outstripped demand and countless indistinguishable goods were competing for buyers, companies had to rely more heavily on branding and advertising. There was a clear need to improve upon existing campaigns, which often simply announced the benefits of a product with grand promises and sparkling smiles…

So if you think which set of stories you end up hearing, you end up hearing the glamor stories, the seductive stories, and again I’m telling you, don’t trust them. They’re people using your love of stories to manipulate you. Pull back and say, “What are the messages, and what are the stories that no one has an incentive to tell?” and start telling yourself those, and see if any of your decisions change…

When we hear stories, should we be more suspicious? And what kind of stories should we be suspicious of? Again, I’m telling you it’s the stories that you like the most, that you find the most rewarding, the most inspiring. The stories that don’t focus on opportunity cost, or the complex, unintended consequences of human action, because that very often does not make for a good story.