Most people can learn to write a simple program in a few hours. Human beings are extremely good at languages, even weird, grammatically constrained, abstract things like a programming languages. That isn’t the problem. In fact, the ease with which most people can pick up a few concepts that allows them to write a few lines of code is a different kind of problem altogether, in that it is sufficiently simple to lull people into a false sense of their own capabilities.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

The difference between a good day and a bad day is often a few productive and healthy choices made at decisive moments.

— James Clear, Atomic Habits

This diseased form of thinking was primarily caused by improper childrearing: inculcated in the child early on by the very people whose words were to be taken as categorical fact—his parents, his teachers, his religious leaders. The child was never given a chance to think for himself, to trust his own judgment and experience. Instead, he was coerced by lies, threats, and punishment to accept on authority, without rational explanation or reference to reality, all sorts of religious notions and cultural prohibitions—which became his superego. And if he happened to escape the supernatural clutches of religion, the same task would almost certainly be accomplished in his nearly decade-and-a-half of compulsory schooling, where acquiring a superego essentially becomes the child’s full-time job. There he is force-fed a veritable glut of arbitrary information that he has neither the time, nor the first-hand experience to understand fully, nor the desire to learn in the first place—and with the inevitable result that he will categorize and memorize instead of learn, and acquire a floating, top-down superego instead of an experientially-based, bottom-up knowledge.

— Roman Gelperin, The Master Mind of the Self-Actualizing Person

…three quarters of Americans hold at least one paranormal belief. Here are some figures from the first decade of our century:

• Possession by the devil, 42 percent
• Extrasensory perception, 41 percent
• Ghosts and spirits, 32 percent
• Astrology, 25 percent
• Witches, 21 percent
• Communicating with the dead, 29 percent
• Reincarnation, 24 percent
• Spiritual energy in mountains, trees, and crystals, 26 percent
• Evil eye, curses, spells, 16 percent
• Consulted a fortune-teller or psychic, 15 percent…

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

Recognizing that your point of view may be imperfect is, in fact, usually the first part of solving a problem. It’s a sign of strength and confidence, whereas dogged refusal to listen to another outlook is more frequently perceived as a sign of shakiness or weakness.

— Peter Hollins, Mental Models