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

If you deliver that faultless and definitive report to your organization, you’ve probably waited too long.

— Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, Super Thinking