Quotes

William Butler Yeats, What then?, 1939

Moral false-positives (failing to recognize an unethical behavior as unethical) are probably more costly than false-negatives (failing to recognize an ethical behavior as ethical). But moral false-negatives are costly, too.

Hugh Ristik, , 2011

We like people who help us, and we help people we life. However, in terms of favours, it is surprising how little it takes for us to like a person, and how much we give on the basis of so little. It seems that if you want to help yourself, you should help others first.

Richard Wiseman, 59 seconds: think a little, change alot, Basingstoke, 2009, p. 75

Researchers have spent a great deal of time looking at the link between people’s scores on these types of questionnaires and happiness. The findings are as consistent as they are worrying –high scores tend to be associated with feeling unhappy and unsatisfied with life. Of course, this is not the case with every single materialist and so, if you did get a high score, you might be one of the happy-go-lucky people who buck the trend. (However, before assuming this, do bear in mind that research also suggests that whenever we are confronted with negative results from tests, we are exceptionally good at convincing ourselves that we are an exception to the rule.)

Richard Wiseman, 59 seconds: think a little, change alot, Basingstoke, 2009, pp. 25-26

If it seems a bit depressing that the most important thing you can do to improve performance is no fun, take consolation in this fact: It must be so. If the activities that lead to greatness were easy and fun, then everyone would do them and they would not distinguish the best from the rest. The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people won’t do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.

Geoff Colvin, Talent is overrated: What really separates world-class performers from everybody else, New York, 2008, p. 72

Two high school seniors sharing a pizza, judging the practicality and morality of anarcho-capitalism—it doesn’t get any better.

Bryan Caplan, An intellectual autobiography, in Walter Block (ed.) I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians, Auburn, Alabama, 2010, pp. 73–82, p. 75

Pérdida de tiempo. Para las mujeres, la duración de un amor que no concluye en matrimonio. “Con Prudencio, perdí siete años.”

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Descanso de caminantes, Buenos Aires, 2001, p. 89

The attitude of the sociological school towards the systems of moral belief that they find current in various ages and races is a curiously inconsistent one. On the one hand we are urged to accept an existing code as something analogous to an existing law of nature, something not to be questioned or criticized but to be accepted and conformed to as part of the given scheme of things; and on this side the school is able sincerely to proclaim itself conservative of moral values, and is indeed conservative to the point of advocating the acceptance in full of conventional morality. On the other hand, by showing that any given code is the product partly of bygone superstitions and partly of out-of-date utilities, it is bound to create in the mind of any one who accepts its teaching (as it presupposes in the mind of the teacher) a sceptical attitude towards any and every given code. In fact the analogy which it draws between a moral code and a natural system like the human body (a favourite comparison) is an entirely fallacious one. By analysing the constituents of the human body you do nothing to diminish the reality of the human body as a given fact, and you learn much which will enable you to deal effectively with its diseases. But beliefs have the characteristics which bodies have not, of being true or false, of resting on knowledge or of being the product of wishes, hopes, and fears; and in so far as you can exhibit them as being the product of purely psychological and non-logical causes of this sort, while you leave intact the fact that many people hold such opinions you remove their authority and their claim to be carried out in practice.

William David Ross, The Right and the Good, Oxford, 1930, p. 13

To think about reality we must use concepts, and certain truths about concepts may reveal, or reflect, truths about reality.

Derek Parfit, Experiences, subjects, and conceptual schemes, Philosophical topics, vol. 26, no. 1-2, 1999, pp. 217–270, pp. 223-224

For a few years, I attended a meeting called Animal Behavior Lunch where we discussed new animal behavior articles. All of the meetings consisted of graduate students talking at great length about the flaws of that week’s paper. The professors in attendance knew better but somehow we did not manage to teach this. The students seemed to have a strong bias to criticize. Perhaps they had been told that “critical thinking” is good. They may have never been told that appreciation should come first. I suspect failure to teach graduate students to see clearly the virtues of flawed research is the beginning of the problem I discuss here: Mature researchers who don’t do this or that because they have been told not to do it (it has obvious flaws) and as a result do nothing.

Seth Roberts, Something is better than nothing, Nutrition, vol. 23, no. 11, 2007, pp. 911–912, p. 912

[W]hen a companion says, “You’re not listening to me,” you can still hear those words, and a few words of the previous sentence, for a brief time after they are spoken. Thus, you can answer (falsely), “I was listening. You said…”—and then you can repeat your annoyed companion’s last few words even though, in truth, you weren’t listening when the words were uttered.

Peter Gray, Psychology, New York, 2006, p. 305

Men and women have different bodies. The differences are the direct result of evolution. Women’s bodies evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food. Men’s bodies evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family.

Men and women have different minds. The differences are the direct result of evolution. Women’s minds evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food. Men’s minds evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family.

The first paragraph is banal; the second inflammatory.

Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, New York, 1993, pp. 247-248

Silver hair and furrowed brows allow aging men to look “distinguished.” That is not the case with aging women, who risk marginalization as “unattractive” or ridicule for efforts to pass as young. This double standard leaves women not only perpetually worried about their appearance, but also worried about worrying.

Deborah L. Rhode, The beauty bias: The injustice of appearance in life and law, New York, 2010, p. xv

[N]o moral conclusions of any kind can be drawn from evolution. The asymmetry in prenatal sexual investment between the genders is a fact of life, not a moral outrage. It is “natural.” It is terribly tempting, as human beings, to embrace such an evolutionary scenario because it “justifies” a prejudice in favor of male philandering, or to reject it because it “undermines” the pressure for sexual equality. But it does neither. It says absolutely nothing about what is right and wrong. I am trying to describe the nature of humans, not prescribe their morality. That something is natural does not make it right. […] Evolution does not lead to Utopia. It leads to a land in which what is best for one man may be the worst for another man, or what is the best for a woman may be the worst for a man. One or the other will be condemned to an “unnatural” fate.

Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, New York, 1993, pp. 180-181

[T]his puzzle is, in the present state of evolutionary and sociological thinking, insoluble. Fashion is change and obsolescence imposed on a pattern of tyrannical conformity. Fashion is about status, and yet the sex that is obsessed with fashion is trying to impress the sex that cares least about status.

Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, New York, 1993, pp. 103-104

The standard lecture is that sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender role behavior are separate, independent psychological traits; a feminine man is as likely to be straight as gay. But the standard lecture is wrong. It was written with good, but mistaken, intentions: to save gay men from the stigma of femininity. The problem is that most gay men are feminine, or at least they are feminine in certain ways. A better solution is to disagree with those who stigmatize male femininity. It is a false and shallow diversity that allows only differences that cannot be observed.

Michael Bailey, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, Washington, 2003, p. xi

It is certainly an unfortunate state of affairs that gay men tend to be feminine, tend to be less attracted to femininity, but tend to be stuck with each other. There are similar ironies in straight relationships. The designer of the universe has a perverse sense of humor.

Michael Bailey, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, Washington, 2003, p. 81

[O] animal humano não se contenta con pouco. Assim como a descoberta da lei da gravidade permitiu ao homem deliberadamente manipular os seus efeitos e fazer um avião voar, os avanços da neurociência estão permitindo compreender e controlar cada vez melhor a mecãnica do bem-estar subjetivo. Chegará o dia em que a posteridade se divertirá ao relembrar como eram primitivas e precárias as drogas lícitas e ilícitas que usamos hoje em dia.

Eduardo Giannetti, Felicidade: diálogos sobre o bem-estar na civilizaçaõ, São Paulo, 2002, p. 157

For Locke and Hume, and British empiricists generally, the way to understand any psychological concept is either to find it among the immediate data of introspection or to show how it is to be analyzed into such data. This approach ultimately stems from the Cartesian insistence that one knows one’s own states of consciousness better than anything else, in particular, better than physical objects and events, since it is possible to doubt the existence of all the latter but not all of the former.

William Alston, Pleasure, in Paul Edwards (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York, 1967, pp. 341–347, p. 622

por que é que, para ser feliz, é preciso não sabê-lo?

Fernando Pessoa, Obra poética, 1976, p. 560