Quotes from 2023

Democracy as a method of human interaction is already millennia old. And we know how easy it is to subvert any democratic process. There are endless examples of people using a democratic system as a games-theory framework of rules to achieve their own ends.

If that work is meant to generate a million dollars a month in revenue, and you can decrease the time it takes to finish that work from 12 months to 6 months, the work you're doing is the most important work that could be happening.

None of us can be damned by anyone but ourselves. No one can be forgiven – no one can be redeemed – save by their own heart.’

One of the great tragedies of science is that the increase in its complexity has made most scientists into little more than technicians, driving them into the tunnels of specialized disciplines. The further the scientist progresses down into the mine of knowledge, the less she can see the world into which that knowledge fits.

The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.

Paz learned the importance of big ideas but also of the frameworks within which those ideas express themselves. Societies are rule-governed. Whether you’re moving vehicles around an urban grid or shaping and firing clay, the meaning of what you do is socially derived. The collective is the broker of all things.

A united humanity. A humanity without disagreements. A humanity without its varied belief systems, without its national histories, without its assortment of cultures and ethnicities—or at least, a humanity where religion, nation, culture, and ethnicity were entirely lacking in meaning. This would be a humanity without differences; speaking one language only, to avoid misunderstanding; subscribing to one set of moral standards, and rejecting all others. It would be by definition a majority humanity; a universal humanity; a monolith humanity.

Should we tolerate all difference? What if the difference is a question of morality? If it is one person’s sincerely held belief that all individuals who do not belong to their own ethnic group should be killed, conflict arises again at once: with their victims, and with any onlooker whose soul is not a total moral void. So immediately we see that there must be limits to toleration. Who defines the limits?

The system offered a simulation of access, rather than the real thing. Tyler said this with a note of disappointment, even betrayal, but it sounded to me like standard user interface. Despite their excitement, they were in exactly the same position I was: they didn’t understand the core systems at all.

There is a baseline arrogance to all of us in the programme. Arrogance and impatience and, whatever else we might say, fear of a certain kind of complexity. That is why we take seriously the notion of transcending the world. Why understand something, when you can jump over it? Why put in the effort?

We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.

They’re blind to a simple truth: complex minds can’t develop on their own. If they could, feral children would be like any others. And minds don’t grow the way weeds do, flourishing under indifferent attention; otherwise all children in orphanages would thrive. For a mind to even approach its full potential, it needs cultivation by other minds.

All of which helps clarify what’s so alarming about the contemporary online ‘attention economy’, of which we’ve heard so much in recent years: it’s essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. And you have far too little control over your attention simply to decide, as if by fiat, that you’re not going to succumb to its temptations.

Some deep thinkers, following in the footsteps of Turing and Dennett, argued that any AI you could have an open-ended conversation with and whose responses on any topic remained indistinguishable from a human interlocutor was as conscious as you were. This raised troubling questions about the likes of Smart-Alec and Iskander. The software engineers who had built the robots insisted this wasn’t the case. The underlying processes were completely different, and consciousness was (it had turned out) superfluous to intelligent conversation. This raised troubling questions about humans.

The technologies we use to try to ‘get on top of everything’ always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the ‘everything’ of which we’re trying to get on top.

If I could get enough work done, my subconscious had apparently concluded, I wouldn’t need to ask if it was all that healthy to be deriving so much of my sense of self-worth from work in the first place. And as long as I was always just on the cusp of mastering my time, I could avoid the thought that what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead.

The only products advertised to young people like the ones I met in Leicester are UPF. This is for a simple reason: UPF is proprietary, so its manufacturers can generate a lot of money. People will pay a lot for a KitKat relative to its cost of production. No one else can really make KitKats, because Nestlé owns the recipe and the trademark and everything that creates the KitKat’s unique barcode that keeps bringing us back.

As the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure.

Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don’t really care about them all that much? I don’t know why, but it’s true.

Among the hallmarks of a charismatic brand are a clear competitive stance, a sense of rectitude, and a dedication to aesthetics. Why aesthetics? Because it’s the language of feeling, and, in a society that’s information-rich and time-poor, people value feeling more than information.

Today there’s still a need for identity manuals and the visual consistency they bring. But consistency alone does not create a brand.

When enough individuals arrive at the same gut feeling, a company can be said to have a brand. In other words, a brand is not what YOU say it is. It’s what THEY say it is.

He did not understand—none of these people did—that this is stochastic land on the edge of a stochastic reservoir. They didn’t understand it because those are statistical concepts. People can’t think statistically. People are hardwired to think in terms of narratives.

Knowledge and understanding is the crown atop the hierarchy of needs, the thing you can’t have enough of.