Meetings must exist, but meetings cannot be seen as the only solution for making progress. If you must meet, start the meeting by remembering that the definition of a successful meeting is that when the meeting is done, it need never occur again.

— Michael Lopp, Managing Humans

If you want to outperform—if you want to do anything not usually done—then you’ll need to conceptually divide our civilization into areas of lower and greater competency.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Inadequate Equilibria

…are the old constrained in their thought by their declining physical condition and hopelessly locked into a historical form of nostalgia?

— Anja Publications, Philosophy Now

The God of the Old Testament murdered innocents by the millions, commanded the Israelites to commit mass rape and genocide, and prescribed the death penalty for blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, adultery, talking back to parents, and working on the Sabbath, while finding nothing particularly wrong with slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

Each generation of seniors has normalized the idea that fundamental knowledge is optional — that you can skip the “boring” parts and jump straight to the “interesting” stuff. We’ve created a culture where depth is seen as inefficiency, where understanding principles is less valued than knowing the latest framework. It’s like deciding that understanding arithmetic is unnecessary because calculators exist, then being surprised when the calculator breaks and nobody knows why 2+2 equals fish.

— Krzyś, The Junior Developer Extinction