Quotes
[Y]ou could spend hundreds of hours doing a detailed comparison of the total number of funds offered, frequency of mailings, and alternative-investment accounts available, but more is lost from indecision than bad decisions.
Ramit Sethi, I will teach you to be rich, New York, 2009, p. 87
Religion, we think, has a great deal to offer to many people—the comfort of faith and the security of community among them. But believing that God doesn’t like sex, as many religions seem to, is like believing that God doesn’t like you. Because of this belief, a tremendous number of people carry great shame for their own perfectly natural sexual desires and activities.
We prefer the beliefs of a woman we met, a devoted churchgoer in a fundamentalist faith. She told us that when she was about five years old, she discovered the joys of masturbation in the back seat of the family car, tucked under a warm blanket on a long trip. It felt so wonderful that she concluded that the existence of her clitoris was proof positive that God loved her.
Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt, The ethical slut: a guide to infinite sexual possibilities, San Francisco, CA, 1997, p. 13
Intensive care succeeds only when we hold the odds of doing harm low enough for the odds of doing good to prevail. This is hard.
Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, New York, 2009, p. 24
[E]ven if average future periods were only about equally as good as the current period, the whole of the future would be about a trillion times more important, in itself, than everything that has happened in the last 100 years.
Nick Beckstead, On the overwhelming importance of shaping the far future, 2013, p. 67
By labeling a tripwire, you can make it easier to recognize, just as it’s easier to spot the word “haberdashery” when you’ve just learned it. Pilots, for example, are taught to pay careful attention to what are called “leemers”: the vague feeling that something isn’t right, even if it’s not clear why. Having a label for those feelings legitimizes them and makes pilots less likely to dismiss them. The flash of recognition—/Oh, this is a leemer/—causes a quick shift from autopilot to manual control, from unconscious to conscious behavior.
That quick switch is what we need so often in life—a reminder that our current trajectory need not be permanent. Tripwires provide a sudden recognition that precedes our actions: I have a choice.
Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Decisive: how to make better choices in life and work, New York, 2013, pp. 236-237
[M]y most essential possession is a standard-sized school notebook, which can be bought at any stationery shop on any high street across the country. I carry this everywhere and write down all the comments that are made to me by Virgin staff and anyone else I meet. I make notes of all telephone conversations and all meetings, and I draft out letters and lists of telephone calls to make.
Over the years I have worked my way through a bookcase of them, and the discipline of writing everything down ensures that I have to listen to people carefully.
Richard Branson, Losing My Virginity: The Autobiography, London, 1998, pp. 407-408
If you push for all or nothing, what you get is nothing.
Henry Spira, quoted in 'The Threat from within' Mark Harris, The Threat from within, Vegetarian Times, vol. 210, 1995, pp. 70, p. 70
Ich glaube nicht an die Freiheit des Willens. Schopenhauers Wort: ‘Der Mensch kann wohl tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will’, begleitet mich in allen Lebenslagen und versöhnt mich mit den Handlungen der Menschen, auch wenn sie mir recht schmerzlich sind. Diese Erkenntnis von der Unfreiheit des Willens schützt mich davor, mich selbst und die Mitmenschen als handelnde und urteilende Individuen allzu ernst zu nehmen und den guten Humor zu verlieren.
Albert Einstein, Mein Glaubensbekenntnis, 1932
I view nootropics as akin to a biological lottery; one good discovery pays for all. I forge on in the hopes of further striking gold in my particular biology. Your mileage will vary. All you have to do, all you can do is to just try it.
Gwern Branwen, Nootropics, 2010
James Randi, ilusionista estadounidense, fue el principal responsable de dejar en claro que el mentalista israelí Uri Geller no tenía poderes paranormales. Geller se hizo mundialmente famoso en la década del ochenta doblando cucharas y arreglando relojes por televisión. Proclamaba poseer dotes mentales sobrenaturales. Gracias a James Randi sus afirmaciones quedaron en ridículo, y su influencia sobre el pensamiento académico fue neutralizada en momentos en que muchos investigadores comenzaban a conjeturar la existencia de leyes ocultas de la física que merecían estudios e inversiones científicas, olvidando hacerse una pregunta prudente ante cualquier clase de afirmación extraordinaria: ¿Qué es más probable, que todas las leyes de la física que conocemos estén equivocadas o que una persona mienta para hacerse rica y famosa?
Andrés Rieznik, Neuromagia: qué pueden ensenarnos los magos (y la ciencia) sobre el funcionamiento del cerebro, Buenos Aires, 2015, p. 32
Non quid dicat sed quid sentiat refert, nec quid uno die sentiat, sed quid assidue.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, 0065
[M]y favorite ad hominem attack of the week came from a blogger who read my Time essay on children and happiness and wrote: “Dr. Gilbert is a very bitter and misguided man who needs to experience fatherhood before he again attempts to write with authority on the subject.” Yes, it was painful for me to learn that I am bitter and misguided. But it was even more painful to learn that I am not a father. I called my 30 year old son to give him the bad news, and he too was chagrined to find that we are unrelated.
Daniel Gilbert, Tears in the Wayback, 2006
Some of life’s other major deficiencies include the lack of savepoints and undo queues.
Dusty Phillips, Hacking happy, Scotts Valley, CA, 2012, p. 34
[I]f something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody.
Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, London, 1840, p. 1
If the engineers didn’t know something, they’d say something like, “Oh, Lifer knows about that; let’s get him in.” Al would call up Lifer, who would come right away. I couldn’t have had a better briefing.
It’s called a briefing, but it wasn’t brief: it was very intense, very fast, and very complete. It’s the only way I know to get technical information quickly: you don’t just sit there while they go through what they think would be interesting; instead, you ask a lot of questions, you get quick answers, and soon you begin to understand the circumstances and learn just what to ask to get the next piece of information you need.
Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character, New York, 1988, pp. 82-84
Las rebeliones estudiantiles de la década de 1960, en particular el mayo parisién de 1968, habían sido apropiadas por la inexactitud posmoderna. Un paredón blanco en la Universidad de Fráncfort amaneció pintado con la leyenda Lernen macht dumm: “Estudiar atonta”.
En algunos lugares, los bárbaros fueron más lejos: en Buenos Aires defenestraron el microscopio electrónico de Eduardo De Robertis; en Montreal montaron una gran manifestación que exigió la francización de la McGill y al año siguiente incendiaron el centro de cálculo de la Sir George Williams University. Ni en Berkeley, ni en París o Montreal exigieron mejoras académicas, por ejemplo, de los estudios sociales. Se proponían hacer ruido, no luz.
Mario Bunge, Memorias: entre dos mundos, Barcelona : Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 2014, p. 204
Although an evolutionary analysis assumes that male aggression against women reflects selection pressures operating during our species’ evolutionary history, it in no way implies that male domination of women is genetically determined, or that frequent male aggression toward women is an immutable feature of human nature. In some societies male aggressive coercion of women is very rare, and even in societies with frequent male aggression toward women, some men do not show these behaviors. Thus, the challenge is to identify the situational factors that predispose members of a particular society toward or away from the use of sexual aggression. [A]n evolutionary frame- work can be very useful in this regard.
Barbara Smuts, Male aggression against women: An evolutionary perspective, Human Nature, vol. 3, no. 1, 1992, pp. 1–44, pp. 2-3
[T]he evolution of superior intelligence in humans was bad for chimpanzees, but it was good for humans. Whether it was good or bad “from the point of view of the universe” is debatable, but if human life is sufficiently positive to offset the suffering we have inflicted on animals, and if we can be hopeful that in future life will get better both for humans and for animals, then perhaps it will turn out to have been good. Remember Bostrom’s definition of existential risk, which refers to the annihilation not of human beings, but of “Earth-originating intelligent life.” The replacement of our species by some other form of conscious intelligent life is not in itself, impartially considered, catastrophic. Even if the intelligent machines kill all existing humans, that would be, as we have seen, a very small part of the loss of value that Parfit and Bostrom believe would be brought about by the extinction of Earth-orginating intelligent life. The risk posed by the development of AI, therefore, is not so much whether it is friendly to us, but whether it is friendly to the idea of promoting wellbeing in general, for all sentient beings it encounters, itself included.
Peter Singer, The logic of effective altruism, Boston Review, July 1, 2015, p. 176
A prima facie argument in favour of the efficacy of prayer is […] to be drawn from the very general use of it. The greater part of mankind, during all the historic ages, has been accustomed to pray for temporal advantages. How vain, it may be urged, must be the reasoning that ventures to oppose this mighty consensus of belief! Not so. The argument of universality either proves too much, or else it is suicidal. It either compels us to admit that the prayers of Pagans, of Fetish worshippers and of Buddhists who turn praying wheels, are recompensed in the same way as those of orthodox believers; or else the general consensus proves that it has no better foundation than the universal tendency of man to gross credulity.
F. Galton, Statistical inquiries into the efficacy of prayer, International Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 41, no. 4, 2012, pp. 923–928, pp. 125–135