Simply by labeling a new regulatory measure “deregulation,” you can frame it in the public mind as a way to reduce bureaucracy and set individual initiative free, even if the result is a fivefold increase in the actual number of forms to be filled in, reports to be filed, rules and regulations for lawyers to interpret, and officious people in offices whose entire job seems to be to provide convoluted explanations for why you’re not allowed to do things.

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

…software engineers are socialized around the idea that their discipline is so difficult, nonengineers are incapable of understanding even the most basic concepts. Resistance from the nontechnical side of an organization tends to be dismissed as ignorance.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

‘Von Neumann, when I was there at Princeton, was under extreme pressure,’ says Benoît Mandelbrot, who had come to the IAS in 1953 at von Neumann’s invitation, ‘from mathematicians, who were despising him for no longer being a mathematician; by the physicists, who were despising him for never having been a real physicist; and by everybody for having brought to Princeton this collection of low-class individuals called “programmers”’.

— Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man From the Future

This lack of luck is attributed to the lack of potential. Kids coming from families with fewer resources usually have access to worse education than their wealthy peers, and thus they end up having lower skilled jobs and lower income levels. Their poverty is reinforced at each stage of life.

— Albert Rutherford, The Elements of Thinking in Systems

No one can think fast enough to deliberate, in words, about each sentence of their stream of consciousness; for that would require an infinite recursion.

— Map and Territory, Eliezer Yudkowsky