‘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

Research by Dan Kahan and colleagues at the Yale Cultural Cognition Project[2] has shown time and again that when confronted with policy issues involving tradeoffs involving technological benefits and risks, it turns out that those who identify as liberals (egalitarians and communitarians) in particular fear change and—to quote Jost—“reject out of hand scientific findings that might be experienced as disagreeable.”

— Michael Shermer, Joe Carter, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Ronald Bailey, and Jason Kuznicki, Brain, Belief, and Politics

…a type checker is just a Neanderthal correctness-prover.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work