ABSTRACT
40 Most of the important things I’ve learned (such as “problems rarely get solved; they mostly become obsolete”) I first heard from someone I disagreed with at the time. Despite this, I’m inclined to find people who agree with me pretty smart. For example, I decided that the late British polymath—novelist, poet, composer—Anthony Burgess qualified when I read in a New York Times article two statements I absolutely endorsed: that he found Los Caracoles restaurant in Barcelona a diner’s delight and that he preferred trains to planes. Like Burgess, I suspect every time I board a plane that I won’t survive, and that I have worsened the odds by flying so often. I know that mathematically this makes no sense: each trip opens a new lottery in which the odds of drawing one of Eli Whitney’s dreaded “blanks” run the same every time, regardless of past experience, just as the odds of tossing heads or tails are always 50-50, even if heads has come up a hundred times in a row.
