Quotes

The modular view is really, really different from the view of the mind that many really, really smart people seem to have of it. Many people, in particular philosophers, think of the mind as unitary. For this reason, they worry a lot about contradictions within the mind. And, really, they can get themselves into a complete tizzy about this. In Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry, a whole bunch of philosophers worry a lot about this problem, so much so that you can almost sense them collectively wringing their hands. In one chapter dramatically called “On the Very Possibility of Self-Deception,” the author discusses two subsystems, which he denotes S1 and S2, in the brain of a person. What if S1 believes one thing, but S2 believes another? This can’t possibly be. Why? Because “the person cannot, of course, be both S1 and S2.”

I love this, especially the “of course.”

Robert Kurzban, Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite: Evolution and the modular mind, Princeton, NJ, 2010, p. 67

No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun – for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax – This won’t hurt.

Hunter Thompson, Football Season Is Over, 2005

Las drogas lo que hacen es inducir modificaciones químicas que también pueden inducir la soledad, el silencio, la abstinencia, el dolor, el miedo. Químicamente, no se puede distinguir a una persona bajo los efectos de una droga que bajo los efectos del yoga, por ejemplo. Químicamente, no somos más que un conjunto de reacciones. Lo que pasa es que la sociedad te dice que, aunque químicamente seas igual, ese ha llegado por el camino bueno y ese por la vía de atrás.

Pepa C. Belmonte, Entrevista a Antonio Escohotado, Escohotado.org, 1999

Cela fait 25 siècles que les gens essayent de comprendre le comportement humain ou la nature humaine – disons depuis le temps d’Aristote ou de Platon. Pourquoi le dernier siècle ou la dernière décennie seraient-ils privilégiés ou plus intéressants ? Y aurait-il plus de génies ou de grands penseurs ? Il n’y a aucune raison de le penser, et de fait c’est faux. Il suffit de lire Montaigne, Aristote, La Rochefoucauld, Tocqueville, Proust, pour ne citer qu’eux : ils débordent d’hypothèses.

Continued research with the tools of genetic epidemiology, population genetics, psychometrics, and cognitive neuroscience is likely to settle many of the contentious issues raised in Nisbett’s book, even without a centralized effort toward any such narrow goal. Given that much of the critical research so clearly lies ahead, Nisbett’s certainty regarding his own premature conclusions is quite remarkable. Some of this may be owed to the disturbing possibilities raised by the alternatives. Even the prospect that current group differences might be eliminated by a combination of biological enhancement and environmental improvement will fail to put all observers at ease, since the prospect of biologically based remedies is itself frightening to many. For what it is worth, I believe that the possibilities regarding both the state of nature and our powers of control should leave us reasonably optimistic about what the future might hold. But I confess to less than total confidence in even this qualified remark, and I envy Nisbett his certitude.

James J. Lee, Review of Richard Nisbett, Intelligence and How to Get It, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 48, no. 2, 2010, pp. 247–255, p. 254

Never since I was a man in the world was I ever so great a stranger to public affairs as now I am, having not read a new book or anything like it, or enquiring after any news, […] or in any wise how things go.

Samuel Pepys, Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1669

I have received the favor of your letter of August 17th, and with it the volume you were so kind as to send me on the “Literature of Negroes.” Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.

Thomas Jefferson, From Thomas Jefferson to Henri Grégoire, 25 February 1809, Founders Online, National Archives, February 25, 1809

If people consistently tell us what they think we want to hear, we will generally be told things that are more comforting than the truth. Digital truth serum, on average, will show us that the world is worse than we have thought.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, New York, 2017, p. 158

Finally, as always, I am grateful to my wife Jan, not only for her help with early portions of the typescript, but even more for the encouragement and interaction (‘Honey, what do you think? Does the number 2 exist?’).

William Lane Craig, God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2016, p. viii

It’s more useful to ask when aid works, not whether.

Andy Sumner, The $138.5 Billion Question: When Does Foreign Aid Work?, Center for Global Development, December 9, 2014

The doctrine of toleration requires a positive as well as a negative statement. It is not only wrong to burn a man on account of his creed, but it is right to encourage the open avowal and defence of every opinion sincerely maintained. Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.

Leslie Stephen, The suppression of poisonous opinions, The Nineteenth Century, vol. 13, no. 73, 1883, pp. 496–508, 653–666, p. 665

The idea that women and men might actually think differently, that is have different preferred modes of thinking or different thinking abilities, came up in both classes. At the time, it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts and mistakes in the research, and bias and prejudice. After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles, I changed my mind. The task I had undertaken certainly wasn’t simple and the conclusions that I had expected to make had to be revised.

The literature on sex differences in cognitive abilities is filled with inconsistent findings, contradictory theories, and emotional claims that are unsupported by the research. Yet, despite all of the noise in the data, clear and consistent messages could be heard. There are real, and in some cases sizable, sex differences with respect to some cognitive abilities. Socialization practices are undoubtedly important, but there is also good evidence that biological sex differences play a role in establishing and maintaining cognitive sex differences, a conclusion that I wasn’t prepared to make when I began reviewing the relevant literature.

Diane F. Halpern, Sex differences in cognitive abilities, New York, 2012, p. xxi

Foot, Thomson, and Edmonds go wrong by treating our moral intuitions about exotic dilemmas not as questionable byproducts of a generally desirable moral rule, but as carrying independent authority and as worthy of independent respect. And on this view, the enterprise of doing philosophy by reference to such dilemmas is inadvertently replicating the early work of Kahneman and Tversky, by uncovering unfamiliar situations in which our intuitions, normally quite sensible, turn out to misfire. The irony is that where Kahneman and Tversky meant to devise problems that would demonstrate the misfiring, some philosophers have developed their cases with the conviction that the intuitions are entitled to a great deal of weight, and should inform our judgments about what morality requires. A legitimate question is whether an appreciation of the work of Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors might lead people to reconsider their intuitions, even in the moral domain.

Cass Sunstein, How Do We Know What, New York Review of Books, 2014

Those who are constantly looking for the “root causes” of poverty, of crime, and of other national and international problems, act as if prosperity and law-abiding behavior were so natural that it is their absence which has to be explained. But a causal glance around the world today, or back through history, would dispel any notion that good things just happen naturally, much less inevitably.

Thomas Sowell, Ever wonder why? And other controversial essays, Stanford, CA, 2006, p. 3

The moral value of quantification is that it treats all lives as equally valuable, so actions that bring down the highest numbers of homicides prevent the greatest amount of human tragedy.

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, New York, 2018, p. 173

When Robert Barro and I were at a conference together years ago, I said that the difference between our models was that he assumed that the agents in his model were as smart as he was, and I assumed they were as dumb as I am. Barro agreed.

Richard Thaler, Misbehaving: the making of behavioral economics, New York, 2015, p. 97

In 1976 Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.

Steven Radelet, The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World, New York, 2015, p. 35

In the story of the life of the Buddha, in the early days of the saṃgha the monks had no fixed abode but wandered throughout the year. Eventually, the Buddha instructed monks to cease their peregrinations during the torrential monsoon period in order to prevent the killing of insects and worms while walking on muddy roads.

Robert E. Buswell and Donald S. Lopez (eds.), The Princeton dictionary of Buddhism, Princeton, 2014, p. 968

A confident man is a dead human being.

J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the known, New York, 1969, ch. 2

I don’t have a hostile disposition toward humankind per se. In fact, I feel quite warmly toward humankind. It’s individual humans I have trouble with.

Robert Wright, Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, New York, 2017, p. 17