Buridan’s donkey, the morose donkey who was stuck between two bales of hay and starved to death as a result of indecision and analysis.

— Peter Hollins, Mental Models

Experiments have shown that when people hear about a new policy, such as welfare reform, they will like it if it is proposed by their own party and hate it if it is proposed by the other—all the while convinced that they are reacting to it on its objective merits.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

Whenever you pass a beggar and feel a compassionate impulse, find a poor person who seems to be laboring industriously and give them the money instead. Distributing a copper to every citizen of the country without discrimination would also be fine. The damage isn’t from giving charity, but from requiring people to appear as beggars to receive it.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Dark Lord’s Answer

Resilience in engineering is all about recovering stronger from failure. That means better monitoring, better documentation, and better processes for restoring services, but you can’t improve any of that if you don’t occasionally fail.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

A second realization of the ecomodernist movement is that industrialization has been good for humanity.8 It has fed billions, doubled life spans, slashed extreme poverty, and, by replacing muscle with machinery, made it easier to end slavery, emancipate women, and educate children (chapters 7, 15, and 17). It has allowed people to read at night, live where they want, stay warm in winter, see the world, and multiply human contact. Any costs in pollution and habitat loss have to be weighed against these gifts.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now