Quote of the Day
If you enjoy programming, philosophy, math, or any number of geeky topics, you're in the right place. Every day, I'll post a random quote from my extensive collection of Kindle highlights. Quotes do not necessarily reflect my views or opinions. In fact, part of my epistemic process is to consume a wide variety of contradictory material.
08/03/2024
I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground
08/02/2024
The nameable goals of the socialist and even Marxist manifestos of the nineteenth century—public education, free health care, a government role in the economy, votes for women—have all been achieved, mostly peacefully and mostly successfully, by acts of reform in liberal countries. The attempt to achieve them by fiat and command, in the Soviet Union and China and elsewhere, created catastrophes, moral and practical, on a scale still almost impossible to grasp.
— Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories
08/01/2024
As Fred Brooks argues, conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design, and if a system is to have it, one person must control the concepts…
— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development
07/31/2024
…to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.’
— E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed
07/30/2024
…isn’t the Minotaur merely the fruit of such sin, not a perpetrator, a victim, the most long-suffering victim?
— Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel, The Physics of Sorrow
1905 post articles, 381 pages.