Asymmetry Quotes

My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates-and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy. ~ John Ruskin

Statin drugs are meant to lower cholesterol in your blood. But there is an asymmetry, and a severe one. One needs to treat fifty high risk persons for five years to avoid a single cardiovascular event. Statins can potentially harm people who are not very sick, for whom the benefits are either minimal or totally nonexistent. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again - making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. [ ... ] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics. ~ Neal Stephenson

Touch can have two meanings: it can be an intimate gesture between equals, a way of saying: I care for you. But between people who are unequal, there's an asymmetry: the powerful may touch the weak - a pat on the back, for example; but the weak may not lay hands on the powerful. His touch probably meant nothing. Any touch I might receive from a family member would be difficult to interpret. It could be a gesture of affection, a bit of condescension, or worst of all, a sexual overture. Or perhaps it might be a confusing mixture of all of these. ~ Rebecca East

Graphic design, which evokes the symmetria of Vituvius, the dynamic symmetry of Hambidge, the asymmetry of Mondrian; which is a good gestalt, generated by intuition or by computer, by invention or by a system of coordinates, is not good design if it does not communicate. ~ Paul Rand

Stoicism's Emotional Robustification Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The universe is asymmetric and I am persuaded that life, as it is known to us, is a direct result of the asymmetry of the universe or of its indirect consequences. The universe is asymmetric. ~ Louis Pasteur

I worry because there is a basic asymmetry, an imbalance, between the two parties. For the Palestinians, it is about status and sovereignty, which could always be adjusted, while for Israel it is about security and trust. And security is something you can't adjust. If you make a mistake on the scrutiny issue, there is no going back. ~ Abraham Foxman

The refusal of laughter to absent itself, in the Soviet case, has already been noted (and will be returned to). It seems that the Twenty Million will never command the sepulchral decorum of the Holocaust. This is not, or not only, a symptom of the general 'asymmetry of indulgence' (the phrase is Ferdinand Mount's). It would not be so unless something in the nature of Bolshevism permitted it to be so. ~ Martin Amis

I will never forget the asymmetry of your eyes. it is transformative symmetry. it is the best symmetry. It is the symmetry that is beauty. ~ Lydia Netzer

The earliest discovery of Pasteur, and for him the most exciting in all his life, was the asymmetry of molecules as a specific characteristic of living organisms-in other words, the fact that the molecules of living matter come in two varieties which, though chemically identical, are in their spatial structure like mirror images to each other-or like right and left gloves. 'Left-handed' molecules rotate polarized light to the left, 'right-handed' molecules to the right; life substances are thus 'optically active'. Why this should be so we still do not quite know; but it remains a challenging fact that 'no other chemical characteristic is as distinctive of living organisms as is optical activity'. ~ Arthur Koestler

The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Most of what we know about sales comes from a world of information asymmetry, where for a very long time sellers had more information than buyers. That meant sellers could hoodwink buyers, especially if buyers did not have a lot of choices or a way to talk back. ~ Daniel H. Pink

Maybe that is what beauty was, for humans. Accidents, imperfections, placed inside a pretty pattern. Asymmetry. The defiance of mathematics. ~ Matt Haig

Slowly what she composed with the new day was her own focus, to bring together body and mind. This was made with an effort, as if all the dissolutions and dispersions of her self the night before were difficult to reassemble. She was like an actress who must compose a face, an attitude to meet the day.

The eyebrow pencil was no mere charcoal emphasis on blond eyebrows, but a design necessary to balance a chaotic asymmetry. Make up and powder were not simply applied to heighten a porcelain texture, to efface the uneven swellings caused by sleep, but to smooth out the sharp furrows designed by nightmares, to reform the contours and blurred surfaces of the cheeks, to erase the contradictions and conflicts which strained the clarity of the face's lines, disturbing the purity of its forms.

She must redesign the face, smooth the anxious brows, separate the crushed eyelashes, wash off the traces of secret interior tears, accentuate the mouth as upon a canvas, so it will hold its luxuriant smile.

Inner chaos, like those secret volcanoes which suddenly lift the neat furrows of a peacefully ploughed field, awaited behind all disorders of face, hair, and costume, for a fissure through which to explode.

What she saw in the mirror now was a flushed, clear-eyed face, smiling, smooth, beautiful. The multiple acts of composure and artifice had merely dissolved her anxieties; now that she felt prepared to meet the day, her true beauty emerged which ~ Anais Nin

The fact of English supremacy is something most native speakers of English unknowingly suppress, all the while enjoying the privileges that come with it. Many non-English-speaking populations, however, cannot afford to suppress that fact but are forced to face it in one way or another, though their writers generally turn their backs on the linguistic asymmetry lest they end up too discouraged to write, overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all. ~ Juliet Winters Carpenter

Golden Ratio is a powerful mathematical constant woven into the very fabric of biology. It is the unique visual tension between comforting symmetry and compelling asymmetry, and its thoughtful application can bring beauty and harmony and intrigue to all manner of designed things. ~ Darrin Crescenzi

It'll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You'll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it's my own. It'll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don't convey my commands at all. It's so unfair: I'm going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself. I didn't see this in the contract when I signed up. Was this part of the deal? ~ Ted Chiang

The answer to information asymmetry is not always the provision of more information, especially when most of this 'information' is simply noise, or boilerplate (standardised documentation bolted on to every report). Companies justifiably complain about the ever-increasing volume of data they are required to produce, while users of accounting find less and less of relevance in them. The notion that all investors have, or could have, identical access to corporate data is a fantasy, but the attempt to make it a reality generates a raft of regulation which inhibits engagement between companies and their investors and impedes the collection of substantive information that is helpful in assessing the fundamental value of securities. In the terms popularised by the American computer scientist Clifford Stoll, 'data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom'.9 In ~ John Kay

There is asymmetry. Those who die do so very early in the game, while those who live go on living very long. Whenever there is asymmetry in outcomes, the average survival has nothing to do with the median survival. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

this is the monumental error of counterinsurgency: despite its success absorbing the asymmetry introduced by guerilla tactics, it still continues to produce the figure of the "terrorist" based on what it is itself. And this is to our advantage, then, provided we don't allow ourselves to embody that figure. It's what all effective revolutionary strategy must accept as its point of departure. The failure of the American strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan bears witness. Counterinsurgency did such a good job of turning "the population" around that the Obama administration has to routinely and surgically assassinate, via drone, anything that might resemble an insurgent ~ Anonymous

women who looked like fashion models - admitted to knowing, from the time they could first consciously think, that the ideal was someone tall, thin, white, and blond, a face without pores, asymmetry, or flaws, someone wholly "perfect," and someone whom they felt, in one way or another, they were not. I ~ Naomi Wolf

The asymmetry of power that cuteness revolves around is another compelling reminder of how aesthetic categories register social conflict. There can be no experience of any person or object as cute that does not somehow call up the subject's sense of power over those who are less powerful. But, as Lori Merish underscores, the fact that the cute object seems capable of making an affective demand on the subject - a demand for care that the subject is culturally as well as biologically compelled to fulfill - is already a sign that "cute" does not just denote a static power differential, but rather a dynamic and complex power struggle. ~ Sianne Ngai

Mad Lib Elegy"

There are starving children left on your plate.
There are injuries without brains.
Migrant workers spend 23 hours a day
removing tiny seeds from mixtures
they cannot afford to smoke
and cannot afford not to smoke.
Entire nations are ignorant of the basic facts
of hair removal and therefore resent
our efforts to depilate unsightly problem areas.
Imprisonment increases life expectancy.
Finish your children. Adopt an injury.
'I'm going to my car. When I get back,
I'm shooting everybody.'
[line omitted in memory of_______]


70% of pound animals will be euthanized.
94% of pound animals would be euthanized
if given the choice. The mind may be trained
to relieve itself on paper. A pill
for your safety, a pill for her pleasure.
Neighbors are bothered by loud laughter
but not by loud weeping.
Massively multiplayer zombie-infection web-games
are all the rage among lifers.
The world is a rare case of selective asymmetry.
The capitol is redolent of burnt monk.
'I'm going to my car. When I get back
I'm shooting everybody.'
[line omitted in memory of _______]


There are two kinds of people in the world:
those that condemn parking lots as monstrosities,
'the ruines of a broken World,' and those
that respond to their majesty emotionally.
70% of the planet is covered in parking lots ~ Ben Lerner

It's be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You'll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it's my own. It'll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don't convey my commands at all. It's so unfair: I'm going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself. I didn't see this in the contract when I signed up. Was this part of the deal?
And then there will be the times when I see you laughing. Like the time you'll be playing with the neighbor's puppy, poking your hands through the chain-link fence separating our back yards, and you'll be laughing so hard you'll start hiccuping. The puppy will run inside the neighbor's house, and your laughter will gradually subside, letting you catch your breath. Then the puppy will come back to the fence to lick your fingers again, and you'll shriek and start laughing again. it will be the most wonderful sound I could ever imagine, a sound that makes me feel like a fountain, or a wellspring.
Now if only I can remember that sound the next time your blithe disregard for self-preservation gives me a heart attack. ~ Ted Chiang

People who know math understand what other mortals understand, but other mortals do not understand them. This asymmetry gives them a presumption of superior ability. ~ Daniel Kahneman

If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world. ~ Dave Van Ronk

The argument that coming into existence is always a harm can be summarized as follows: Both good and bad things happen only to those who exist. However, there is a crucial asymmetry between the good and the bad things. The absence of bad things, such as pain, is good even if there is nobody to enjoy that good, whereas the absence of good things, such as pleasure, is bad only if there is somebody who is deprived of these good things. The implication of this is that the avoidance of the bad by never existing is a real advantage over existence, whereas the loss of certain goods by not existing is not a real disadvantage over never existing. ~ David Benatar

The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology. ~ Sean M. Carroll

The full costs of consumption beyond market prices are hard to determine and hard to see, and they are typically underestimated. The benefits of consumption, by contrast, are immediate and tangible, and they are typically overestimated, thanks in part to an enormous and enormously sophisticated marketing apparatus. This asymmetry contributes to our overconsumption. ~ James Gustave Speth

The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nearly all libertarians were once conservatives or progressives or independent statists of some stripe. But scarcely any conservatives, progressives, or independent statists were once libertarians. This asymmetry in the direction of ideological migration is interesting and perhaps informative. ~ Robert Higgs

Today's Republican Party ... is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance. ~ Thomas E. Mann

There is a vast asymmetry in the dynamic here that Billy can't quite put his finger on, even though it's the elephant shitting all over the room. ~ Ben Fountain

This was not a world of men. It was a world of gods, a time of great powers. It was the era of divinity walking in man, of wind and water and fire. And in warfare, she who held the power asymmetry was the inevitable victor. ~ R.F. Kuang

The internet does not adhere to the inherent, necessary asymmetry of high-versus-low-art categorizations that we use in the cultural sector: in a banal sense, all photographs on the Web are orphans ready to be claimed. ~ Charlotte Cotton