#thinking (45 quotes)
Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.
— Galileo Galilei She is increasingly of the opinion that worrying about problems doesn’t help solve them, but she hasn’t really found an alternative yet. Surely you can’t just leave them there.
— , Pattern Recognition Homo sapiens are about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.
— , Pattern Recognition Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms?
— , Consider Phlebas This is what I want to learn: to notice, but not to analyse. To still the part of the brain that’s yammering, ‘My god, what’s that? A stork, a crane, an ibis? – don’t be silly, its just a weird heron.’ Sometimes we have to hush the frantic inner voice that says ‘Don’t be stupid,’ and learn again to look, to listen. You can do the organising and redrafting, the diagnosing and identifying later, but right now, just be open to it, see how it’s tilting nervously into the wind, try to see the colour, the unchancy shape – hold it in your head, bring it home intact.
— , Findings Only the unknown terrifies men. Once confronted, it is no longer the unknown.
— , Wind, Sand and Stars In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world—hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability. But technology and incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up.
— , Slow Ideas At last, however, we have begun to see that true sanity has nothing at all to do with norms or averages. This redefinition emerged only when some got around to asking the simplest of questions. “What are the most common traits of nearly all forms of mental illness?” The answer? Nearly all sufferers lack:
Flexibility—to be able to change your opinion or course of action, if shown clear evidence you were wrong.
Satiability—the ability to feel satisfaction if you actually get what you said you wanted, and to transfer your strivings to other goals.
Extrapolation—an ability to realistically assess the possible consequences of your actions and to empathize, or guess how another person might think or feel.
This answer crosses all boundaries of culture, age, and language. When a person is adaptable and satiable, capable of realistic planning and empathizing with his fellow beings, those problems that remain turn out to be mostly physiochemical or behavioral.
— , Earth The measure of (mental) health is flexibility (not comparison to some ‘norm’), the freedom to learn from experience … to be influenced by reasonable arguments … and the appeal to the emotions … and especially the freedom to cease when sated. The essence of illness is the freezing of behavior into unalterable and insatiable patterns.
— , Sundiver Never before have human beings so benefited from membership in a sagacious, scientific, and increasingly virtuous civilization. Wisdom flowers and spreads… even as does silliness. Like the absurd assertion (repeated ad nauseam by left and right) that wisdom hasn’t grown! A damnable outright lie. This is a bona fide renaissance, threatening to make everything better, in all ways. A renaissance that must find every potentially lethal error and hence, ironically, benefits from endless criticism. Helpful, vigorous criticism — but not chic-cynical despair.
— , Existence It is harder to dispose of anything, or to act selfishly towards it, once one has paid attention to its details. This is an environmentalist’s truth, as well as a humanist’s.
— , Only connect Imagine a satellite blow-up of a city on mosaic, 1:10,000 scale. It’ll take up most of a decent interior wall, so stand well back. There are certain obvious things you can tell at a glance. Is it a planned development or did it grow organically, responding to centuries of differing demand? Is it or was it ever fortified? Does it have a seaboard? Look closer, and you can learn more. Where the major thoroughfares are likely to be, if there is an IP shuttle port, if the city has parks. You can maybe, if you’re a trained cartographer, even tell a little about the movements of the inhabitants. Where the desirable areas of town are, what the traffic problems are likely to be and if the city has suffered any serious bomb damage or riots recently. But there are some things you will never know from that picture. However much you magnify and reel in detail, it can’t tell you if crime is generally on the increase, or what time the citizens go to bed. It can’t tell you if the mayor is planning to tear down the old quarter, if the police are corrupt, or what strange things have been happening at Number Fifty-One, Angel Wharf. And the fact that you can break down the mosaic into boxes, move it around and reassemble it elsewhere makes no difference. Some things you will only ever learn by going into that city and talking to the inhabitants.
— , Altered Carbon Limiting our competence to our profession, and perhaps a consuming hobby or two, renders a large part of the world bewildering—and few things incline someone more powerfully to immobility.
— , Diseases of Affluence In the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another.
— , Scott And Scurvy No one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No one cares what you do, unless you think about what you do. No one ever really cares what you say.
— , Six Questions from Kicker If you can identify what are the valid criticisms of your code or your ideas or your writing, and who are the trolls, and which are the other people just being temporarily stupid obtuse geniuses-in-waiting, you can parlay all that valid feedback and move from fool to slightly less fool in quick time.
— , on being a bit of an idiot Don’t let thinking get in the way of building – build, then think.
— , Delighting with Data The arguments of Bruce and Shulman suppose that great ideas are precious. It is too much for them to imagine that a discovery as remarkable as the telephone could arise in two places at once. But five people came up with the steamboat, and nine people came up with the telescope, and, if Gray had fallen into the Grand River along with Bell, some Joe Smith somewhere would likely have come up with the telephone instead and Ma Smith would have run the show. Good ideas are out there for anyone with the wit and the will to find them.
— , In the Air Pay attention, that's all… Notice things. Connect what you’ve noticed. Connect it into a picture. Think of how the picture might be changed; and act to change it. Some of your acts may turn out to be foolish, but others will reward you in surprising ways; and in the meantime, simply by being active instead of passive, you have a kind of immunity that’s hard to explain.
— , The Confusion Via alexcreed.
Nothing can substitute for depth of analysis, and there’s proven value in specialization – it’s what education, career paths, scientific research, and technological innovation are built on – but generalism is a secret talent. With so much complex information, fragmented in so many ways and developing faster and faster, it is increasingly important to have generalists around to make sense of it all, of the big picture.
— , What Specifically Do Generalists Do?