#thinking (45 quotes)
This is the pattern of the rule of salt. Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures. The pulse beats faster, the pressure rises, the voice of instinct drives out reason and education. At a certain point, things become inevitable.
— , The Future Ideas are frictional, factional entities which wilt when pinned to flowcharts. Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions.
— , The Ministry of Time The anger rose up, joyfully. ‘Yes! I’m me! I am careful and logical and I look up things I don’t understand! When I hear people use the wrong words I get edgy! I am good with cheese. I read books fast! I think! And I always have a piece of string! That’s the kind of person I am!’
— , The Wee Free Men And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.
— , Firefall 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.
— , Firefall 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?
— , How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.
— , The Left Hand of Darkness When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
— , The Left Hand of Darkness 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.
— , The Candy House Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so. They are like whodunits after you know who did it. Does anyone reread a murder mystery? Whereas the cosmos has been mysterious to humans since long before we knew anything about astronomy or space—and, now that we do, is only more so.
— , The Candy House So little is actually worthy of either belief or disbelief. Better to strive to co-exist, than seek to disprove…
— , The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet 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?
— , In Ascension 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.
— , Exhalation 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.
— , Termination Shock Knowledge and understanding is the crown atop the hierarchy of needs, the thing you can’t have enough of.
— , Children of Memory Everybody always thought they were right, and shared, too, the quaint belief that the very fervency of a belief, however deluded, somehow made it true.
— , Matter Monocausotaxophilia, the love of single ideas that explain everything, one of humanity’s most common cognitive errors.
— , The Ministry for the Future The narcissism of small differences. That’s an odd name. It’s Freud’s name. Means more regard for yourself than for your allies or the problems you both face.
— , The Ministry for the Future Educators are people too, subject to the same cognitive limitations and biases as everyone else. The lack of scientific literacy, combined with deep faith in the validity of personal observation, creates vulnerability to claims that are intuitively appealing but unproved or untrue.
— , Language at the Speed of Sight Nobody truly decided for themselves. There was too much information. What they actually did was scope around, decide who was looking out for their clan, and sign on for the memos on a wide array of topics.
— , Flight Behaviour They are performing that oldest of tricks: constructing a path by which to reach a destination, only in this case the destination is permanent security. With each step they take towards it, that security recedes. And, with each step they take, the cost of progressing towards such security grows, and the actions required to move forward become more and more extreme.
— , Children of Time Everything is only information, if you have sufficient capacity to encompass it.
— , Children of Time You can tell you’ve found a really interesting question when nobody wants you to answer it.
— , Nemesis Games The mind cannot carry away all that it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.
— , The Living Mountain From an evolutionary point of view, the purpose of consciousness seems to be this: an animal composed of a giant collection of zombie systems would be energy efficient but cognitively inflexible. It would have economical programs for doing particular, simple tasks, but it wouldn’t have rapid ways of switching between programs or setting goals to become expert in novel and unexpected tasks.
— , Incognito