Quotes

People have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.

The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest.

Attention becomes the only metric by which culture is judged, and what gets attention is dictated by equations developed by Silicon Valley engineers. The outcome of such algorithmic gatekeeping is the pervasive flattening that has been happening across culture. By flatness I mean homogenization but also a reduction into simplicity: the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most. Flatness is the lowest common denominator, an averageness that has never been the marker of humanity’s proudest cultural creations.

With today’s bloated software, making a UI more dense in time is more impactful than just squeezing more stuff onto each screen. That’s why Bloomberg’s Terminal is still such a dominant tool in the financial analysis space; it loads data almost instantaneously. A skilled Terminal user can navigate between dozens of charts and graphs in milliseconds. There are plenty of ways to cram tons of financial data into a table, but loading it with no latency is Terminal’s real superpower.

When deciding what you're doing, ask yourself: What are you trying to change? What is your vision for the future? What is within your abilities? What do you know about the quality of what exists today? What further research will help you understand it? What has been done before? What can you learn from those experiences? What is the market and competition like? Has anyone succeeded or failed at this in the past?

The only way to know what happens next is to do it.

Sometimes, we have to move forward knowing that other people tried to make sense of this mess and failed. We may need to shine the light brighter or longer than they did. Perhaps now is a better time. We may know the outcomes of their fate, but we don't know our own yet. We can't until we try.

Where others see a website that’s good for wasting time, Germans see a comprehensive surveillance tool that needs muscular oversight.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

Every level of complexity floats freely on the last, supported only by abstractions.

The girl’s hands darted over the keyboards and the air was filled with the tones of that most ancient of Japanese instruments: the synthesizer.

Love doesn’t have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. The purpose is not to change the people we love, but to give them what they need to thrive. Love’s purpose is not to shape our beloved’s destiny, but to help them shape their own. It isn’t to show them the way, but to help them find a path for themselves, even if the path they take isn’t one we would choose ourselves, or even one we would choose for them.

Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

The problem with any really advanced intelligence, it seemed, was that just by existing it tended to erode the autonomy of all the selves around it.

Easy’s fast, and hard takes all the time.

An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances.

When people posit disability as a problem, they look for solutions. Disabled people can and do have problems, which sometimes include pain and dysfunction. However, many of our problems are social, structural, and practical problems that stem from the idea that disabled people are fundamentally flawed, unworthy of inclusion, broken, or inadequate. This is ableist thinking. We have to resist these kinds of assumptions, which produce simplistic disability stories that collapse disabled people into stereotypes.

This I learned, meatbag, this and nothing more: when air, food, and shelter are assured, only two things matter. Work and companionship. To be alone and without purpose is to be the living dead.

You have only small and seemingly pointless choices available to you. But if there is anything I have been trying to teach you, it is that small actions can have larger consequences. If one has only small choices available, one must be patient, and canny.

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

‘What?’ they’d say. ‘You don’t want this unpleasant circumstance we’re forcing on you? Then you’re obviously in favour of this absurdly exaggerated opposite we’ve just invented.’

The need for personal glory is like cigarette addiction: a habit that feels life-sustaining even as it kills you.

But my problem is the same one had by everyone who gathers information: What to do with it? How to sort and shape and use it? How to keep from drowning in it? Not every story needs to be told.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.