Quotes

[S]uppose, that all the historians who treat of England, should agree, that, on the first of January 1600, Queen Elizabeth died; that both before and after her death she was seen by her physicians and the whole court, as is usual with persons of her rank; that her successor was acknowledged and proclaimed by the parliament; and that, after being interred a month, she again appeared, resumed the throne, and governed England for three years: I must confess that I should be surprized at the concurrence of so many odd circumstances, but should not have the least inclination to believe so miraculous an event. I should not doubt of her pretended death, and of those other public circumstances that followed it: I should only assert it to have been pretended, and that it neither was, nor possibly could be real. You would in vain object to me the difficulty, and almost impossibility of deceiving the world in an affair of such consequence; the wisdom and solid judgment of that renowned queen; with the little or no advantage which she could reap from so poor an artifice: All this might astonish me; but I would still reply, that the knavery and folly of men are such common phaenomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature.

David Hume, An enquiry concerning human understanding: A critical edition, Oxford, 2000

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.

But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.

You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.

My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.

Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, New York, 2010, pp. 36-37

When in different parts of a book there are passages from which the casual reader may obtain two different ideas of what the book is proving, and when one version of the thesis is interesting but false and the other true but trivial, it becomes the duty of a reviewer to give warning at least against the false version. My review of The Triumph of Mediocrity in Business was chiefly devoted to warning readers not to conclude that business firms have a tendency to become mediocre, or that the mediocre type of business tends with the passage of time to become increasingly representative or triumphant. That such a warning was needed is suggested by the title of the book and by various passages in it, and confirmed by the opinions of several eminent economists and statisticians who have taken the trouble to write or speak about the matter.

It is now clear that a tendency to stability or mediocrity of the kind which I showed was unproven, was not what the author intended to prove, and that a sufficiently careful reader would not be misled. But the thesis of the book, when correctly interpreted, is essentially trivial.

Consider a statistical variate x whose variance does not change from year to year, but for which there is a correlation r between successive values for the same individual. Let the individuals be grouped so that in a certain year all those in a group have values of x within a narrow range. Then among the mean values in these groups, the variance (calculated with the group frequencies as weights) will in the next year be less than that in the first year, in a ratio of which the mean value for linear regression and fine grouping is /r/², but in any case is /η/², less than unity. This theorem is proved by simple mathematics. It is illustrated by genetic, astronomical, physical, sociological and other phenomena. To “prove” such a mathematical result by a costly and prolonged numerical study of many kinds of business profit and expense ratios is analogous to proving the multiplication table by arranging elephants in rows and columns, and then doing the same for numerous other kinds of animals. The performance, though perhaps entertaining, and having a certain pedagogical value, is not an important contribution either to zoology or to mathematics.

Harold Hotelling, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1934, pp. 198-199

When our minds are incessantly preoccupied with the rewards or dangers that may await us at the end of our journey, we are cutting ourselves off from the richness of life itself, and from our ability to recognize it in the texture of each moment along the way. In any one moment, this may seem no great loss–but a whole life of lost moments is a whole life lost.

Mark Williams et al., Mindful way through depression: Freeing yourself from chronic unhappiness, New York, 2007, p. 226

[W]e know what kinds of physical and psychological features make someone attractive to others. It’s often the case that someone is attracted to someone else because of some such specific feature (e.g., smooth skin) without realizing the cause of the attraction. Then you could see courtship, dating, and the development of a long-term relationship forming—all because one member of the couple had smooth skin when they first met and this feature was attractive enough to spark the courtship process. When asked years later about how the relationship began, the smooth skin when they first met may well be the kind of detail that gets lost in the retelling.

Glenn Geher and Scott Barry Kaufman, Mating intelligence unleashed: The role of the mind in sex, dating, and love, New York, 2013, p. 125

Whenever you can, count.

Francis Galton, quoted in James Newman (ed.), The World of Mathematics, New York, 1956, p. 1169

[T]he case of Chile seems to underscore a theme of earlier chapters: social and political movements have a surprisingly modest effect on the rate of social mobility. Events that at the time seem crucial, powerful, and critical determinants of the fate of societies leave astonishingly little imprint in the objective records of social mobility rates. Allende tried to remake Chilean society and died bravely when the military intervened to destroy his dream. Thousands were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered under Pinochet’s brutal military regime. But if social mobility rates were the only record of the history of Chile in the past hundred years, we would detect no trace of these events. Despite the cries, the suffering, the outrage, and the struggle, social mobility continued its slow shuffle toward the mean, indifferent to the events that so profoundly affected the lives of individual Chileans.

Gregory Clark, The son also rises: Surnames and the history of social mobility, 2015, p. 211

I said that believing that no inequality could truly reflect real freedom of choice would contradict your reactions to people in day-to-day life, and that I lack that belief. I lack that belief because I am not convinced that it is true both /that all choices are causally determined /and that causal determination obliterates responsibility. If you are indeed so convinced, then do not blame me for thinking otherwise, do not blame right-wing politicians for reducing welfare support (since, in your view, they can’t help doing so), do not, indeed, blame, or praise, anyone for choosing to do anything, and therefore live your life, henceforth, differently from the way that we both know that you have lived it up to now.

Gerald Allen Cohen, Why Not Socialism?, Why Not Socialism?, 2009, pp. 83 p., pp. 29-30

A good rule of thumb to ask yourself in all situations is, “If not now, then when?” Many people delay important habits, work and goals for some hypothetical future. But the future quickly becomes the present and nothing will have changed.

Bernadette Young, Parenthood and effective altruism, Effective Altruism Forum, April 13, 2014

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

Nassim Taleb, The black swan: The impact of the highly improbable, New York, 2007, p. 133

Keyhole surgery techniques allow surgeons to operate without making large incisions, minimizing the risk of complications and side effects. Economists often advocate a similar strategy when trying to fix a policy problem: target the problem as closely as possible rather than attempting something a little more drastic.

Tim Harford, The undercover economist: exposing why the rich are rich, the poor are poor—and why you can never buy a decent used car!, Oxford, 2006, p. 138

Cannibalism is so repugnant to us that for years even anthropologists failed to admit that it was common in prehistory. It is easy to think: could other human beings really be capable of such a depraved act? But of course animal rights activists have a similarly low opinion of meat eaters, who not only cause millions of preventable deaths but do so with utter callousness: castrating and branding cattle without an anesthetic, impaling fish by the mouth and letting them suffocate in the hold of a boat, boiling lobsters alive. My point is not to make a moral case for vegetarianism but to shed light on the mindset of human violence and cruelty. History and ethnography suggest that people can treat strangers the way we now treat lobsters, and our incomprehension of such deeds may be compared with animal rights activists’ incomprehension of ours. It is no coincidence that Peter Singer, the author of The Expanding Circle, is also the author of Animal Liberation.

Steven Pinker, The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature, New York, 2002, p. 320

[C]ivilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain.

Paradójicamente, los detractores más implacables de las novelas policiales, suelen ser aquellas personas que más se deleitan en su lectura. Ello se debe, quizá, a un inconfesado prejuicio puritano: considerar que un acto puramente agradable no puede ser meritorio.

Museo: textos inéditos, Buenos Aires, 2002, p. 112

[A] man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

Hunter S. Thompson, Letter to Hume Logan, April 22, 1958, in Shaun Usher (ed.) Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, San Francisco, 2014, p. 67

The benefit of knowledge is that it makes the world more predictable, but the cost is that a predictable world sometimes seems less delicious, less exciting, less poignant.

Timothy D. Wilson et al., The pleasures of uncertainty: Prolonging positive moods in ways people do not anticipate, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 88, no. 1, 2005, pp. 5–21, p. 5

It takes […] what Berkeley calls a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to ask for the why of any instinctive human act. To the metaphysician alone can such questions occur as: Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down? The common man can only say, “/Of course/ we smile, of course our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made from all eternity to be loved!”

William James, The principles of psychology, New York, 1905, pp. 386-387

[W]e can appeal to rights when moral matters have been settled. In other words, our appeals to rights may serve as shields, protecting our moral progress from the threats that remain. Likewise, there are times when it makes sense to use “rights” as weapons, as rhetorical tools for making moral progress when arguments have failed.

Joshua Greene, Moral tribes: emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them, London, 2013, p. 308

[O]ne of the strongest examples of essentialism concerns the difference between the sexes. Before ever learning about physiology, genetics, evolutionary theory, or any other science, children think that there is something internal and invisible that distinguishes boys from girls. This essentialism can be explicit, as when one girl explained why a boy will go fishing rather than put on makeup: “’Cause that’s they boy instinct.” And seven-year-olds tend to endorse statements such as “Boys have different things in their innards than girls” and “Because God made them that way” (a biological essence and a spiritual essence). Only later in development do children accept cultural explanations, such as “Because it is the way we have been brought up.” You need to be socialized to think about socialization.

Paul Bloom, How pleasure works: the new science of why we like what we like, New York, 2011, p. 17

Another possibility is that our intuitive sense of justice is a set of heuristics: moral machinery that’s very useful but far from infallible. We have a taste for punishment. This taste, like all tastes, is subtle and complicated, shaped by a complex mix of genetic, cultural, and idiosyncratic factors. But our taste for punishment is still a taste, implemented by automatic settings and thus limited by its inflexibility. All tastes can be fooled. We fool our taste buds with artificial sweeteners. We fool our sexual appetites with birth control and pornography, both of which supply sexual gratification while doing nothing to spread our genes. Sometimes, however, our tastes make fools of us. Our tastes for fat and sugar make us obese in a world of abundance. Drugs of abuse hijack our reward circuits and destroy people’s lives. To know whether we’re fooling our tastes or whether our tastes are fooling us, we have to step outside the limited perspective of our tastes: To what extent is this thing—diet soda, porn, Nutella, heroin—really serving our bests interests? We should ask the same question about our taste for punishment.

Joshua Greene, Moral tribes: emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them, London, 2013, p. 272