I’ve seen people severely messed up by their own knowledge of biases. They have more ammunition with which to argue against anything they don’t like. And that problem—too much ready ammunition—is one of the primary ways that people with high mental agility end up stupid…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

Innate mechanisms are important not because everything is innate and learning is unimportant, but because the only way to explain learning is to identify the innate mechanisms that make learning possible.

— Steven Pinker, Language, Cognition, and Human Nature

You can’t protect yourself against your own people’s incompetence.

— Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, Peopleware

The news, far from being a “first draft of history,” is closer to play-by-play sports commentary.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

The prevailing feeling is that too many opportunities are opening too quickly and that our ability to modify genes is outpacing our capacity for making wise and farsighted use of the skill.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens