Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Data, information, and knowledge are important raw materials, but in their typically fragmented abundance, they don’t easily lead to understanding and wisdom; rather, they hamper that progression and thus become another facet of the complexity.

— David Komlos and David Benjamin, Cracking Complexity

If the rules of rationality are mathematical laws, then trying to justify evidence-free belief by pointing to someone else doing the same thing will be around as effective as listing thirty reasons why you shouldn’t fall off a cliff.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

The sixty years with nuclear power have seen thirty-one deaths in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the result of extraordinary Soviet-era bungling, together with a few thousand early deaths from cancer above the 100,000 natural cancer deaths in the exposed population. The other two famous accidents, at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Fukushima in 2011, killed no one. Yet vast numbers of people are killed day in, day out by the pollution from burning combustibles and by accidents in mining and transporting them, none of which make headlines.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

…committee specification is why large and super-ambitious software systems seem so prone to total disaster.

— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design