Archive

…power is given only to the one who dares to reach down and take it.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

This is a book about a radical idea…One that has long been known to make rulers nervous…That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.

— Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History

…our ubiquitous quality improvement programs just make real quality improvement harder.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

In the long-term, companies either learn to explore, or they fade away; this isn’t an ignorable challenge.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

…if you plan to use a productivity tool, you should add about 25 percent on top of the total time you expect to spend working with the tool for use in working around the tool’s limitations.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

If we used a million computers, each with a billion cores, where each core can compute a quintillion operations a second, it would still take nearly a googol ages of the universe to look through all the possible cliques of fifty people among the 20,000 residents of Frenemy (a googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros). The P versus NP problem still remains relevant in a parallel world.

— Lance Fortnow, The Golden Ticket

No rich man ever succeeds in disguising himself as a poor man; for money, like murder, will out.

— George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Competition between segments of the scientific community is the only historical process that ever actually results in the rejection of one previously accepted theory or in the adoption of another.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Why would people ever think, when thinking deprives them of “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved”—especially in an online environment where the social approval of one’s attitudes is so much easier to acquire, in the currency of likes, faves, followers, and friends?

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

As a leader, you should be working very intentionally to spark as much emotion and passion as you can among your team rather than worrying about running the kinds of conventional management studies that try to measure how hard or fast people are working.

— Jim Whitehurst and Gary Hamel, The Open Organization

For me, this is exactly what’s so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money – and then tell us that it’s only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money.

— David Graeber, Debt

“every village boy of twelve knows how to use a lever better than the cleverest mechanician in the academy” because they learned it through play. “The lessons you learn in the playground are worth a hundredfold more than what they learn in the classroom.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: Or On Education

Focusing on the “self” gives management unprecedented cultural power. It intensifies work in ways which are nearly impossible to resist. Who would be able to refuse the invitation to express themselves and their presumed potential or talents?

— Bogdan Costea, Today’s management-speak has a lot in common with 1930s Soviet propaganda—and it’s making people miserable

At least a galley slave knows that he’s oppressed. An office worker forced to sit for seven and a half hours a day pretending to type into a screen for $18 an hour, or a junior member of a consultancy team forced to give the exact same seminar on innovation and creativity week in and week out for $50,000 a year, is just confused.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

A year and a half’s FY2019 proposed funding for the Department of Defense roughly equals the entire run of NASA funding across the agency’s sixty-year history.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Avis Lang, Accessory to War

‘If people do not believe that mathematics is simple,’ von Neumann once said, ‘it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.’

— Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man From the Future

We can’t just say all you need are lambdas—Alonzo Church proved it, so we’re not going to add any more to the language. That’s the sort of impoverished approach that tries to make everybody into an expert and it will not work on the large number of programmers out there who have been mistrained in these Java schools.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

Joy is only for those whose life accords with the given Order of the world.

— Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence

It’s not wrong to make a list of things that you need to do, and then start doing those things. What’s unrealistic is believing that the list is right no matter what new information arises as you move through its action items. What’s wrong is viewing that list as your work, disconnected from a higher outcome. Countless studies have shown that when people are connected to a higher purpose, they do better work. They’re more motivated. They’re happier.

— Janice Fraser, Jason Fraser, and Eric Ries, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama

“But is there not a pleasure,” said Candide, “in criticising everything, in pointing out faults where others see nothing but beauties?”

— Voltaire, Candide

“The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasise specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. ‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.”

— Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote

In short, people who believe that success depends only on talent and effort and have an exaggerated sense of how talented they are may find it easier to muster the kinds of effort necessary for success. If so, those false beliefs may be perversely adaptive.

— Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck

When you read good, coherent actions, you think, “This is going to be uncomfortable, but I think it can work.” When you read bad ones, you think, “Ah, we got afraid of the consequences, and we aren’t really changing anything.”

— Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle

…belief is easier than disbelief; we believe instinctively, but disbelief requires a conscious effort.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Map and Territory

“[The common definition of estimate is] ‘An estimate is the most optimistic prediction that has a non-zero probability of coming true.’ “Accepting this definition leads irrevocably toward a method called what’s-the-earliest-date-by-which-you-can’t-prove-you-won’t-be-finished estimating.”

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

What is the point of knowledge if it doesn’t help anyone or produce anything? … shift as much of your time and effort as possible from consuming to creating.

— Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain

I am inclined to see philosophy as arising from a basic aspect of our nature, a thought-drive we possess, the cognitive equivalent to the libido. This thought-drive, call it the epinoia (epino-ah), is an irreducible instinct within us to question, wonder, challenge, probe, explode, shake, shatter, rattle, prod, flip, whip, stretch… in a word, think. Whereas the libido seeks satisfaction, the epinoia, tireless and indefatigable, seeks the endless flight of thought. It never settles. It craves problems, seeks perplexities, and shows no interest in sound conclusions or tidy answers.

— David Birch, Pandora’s Book

Since verbal behavior (spoken or written) is what gets the gold star, students begin to think that verbal behavior has a truth-value.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Map and Territory

…if the poor are to be given relief so they don’t actually starve, it has to be delivered in the most humiliating and onerous ways possible, because otherwise they would become dependent and have no incentive to find proper jobs.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Underlings have to constantly monitor what the boss is thinking; the boss doesn’t have to care. That, in turn, is one reason, I believe, why psychological studies regularly find that people of working-class background are more accurate at reading other people’s feelings, and more empathetic and caring, than those of middle-class, let alone wealthy, backgrounds.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

There’s never an easy answer to the question “Should we do more testing?” because information can guide risk reduction, but doesn’t necessarily do so.

— Gerald Weinberg, Perfect Software and Other Illusions About Testing

If someone starts out by asking whether or not AIs are gonna put us into capsules like in The Matrix, they’re jumping to a 100-bit proposition, without a corresponding 98 bits of evidence to locate it in the answer space as a possibility worthy of explicit consideration.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

Knuth has stated that he feels that at the beginning of the 1970s, academics were good programmers and industry professionals were not. Yet during that decade, as the scope of software that industry wrote increased, the situation reversed itself, and by the end of the decade the academics had drifted out of sync with what was going on in industry and restricted their programming, and therefore their area of expertise, to smaller programs that were no longer useful for generating advice for industry.

— Adam Barr, The Problem With Software

Reasoning that doesn’t rest until we can find a secure foundation for some belief might be thrilling to philosophers, but it is anguishing, and, frankly, feels unnecessary for the rest of us most of the time.

— Kevin Currie-Knight, Humans, the Believing Animals

Philosophy and science are only able to function in effect by opposing ‘the intelligible world’ to the ‘physical world’ in such a manner that the second is always devalued in relation to the first.

— Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought

…perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining…

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

…special-purpose languages act as limits to thought in this manner, they are harmful to the user who potentially has larger problems to solve.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

When you value planning above outcomes, it’s easy to conflate effort with achievement. Having done work or checked things off a list isn’t the same as creating value through your actions.

— Janice Fraser, Jason Fraser, and Eric Ries, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama

The danger of symmetry, and repetition especially, is that it can be used as a substitute for thought.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

If I outline twenty ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I actually sit down and write an article, that’s action. If I search for a better diet plan and read a few books on the topic, that’s motion. If I actually eat a healthy meal, that’s action. … more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.

— James Clear, Atomic Habits

Lewis explains: How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic sense), precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable. Each person is almost a species in himself….If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

In short, there was terrible disorder. It seemed to me, at first glance, that both of them—the gentleman and the lady—were decent people, but reduced by poverty to that humiliating state in which disorder finally overcomes every attempt to struggle with it and even reduces people to the bitter necessity of finding in this disorder, as it increases daily, some bitter and, as it were, vengeful sense of pleasure.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

Organizations that have random or casual methods of acquiring software tools waste about 50 percent of all the money they spend on tools.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

The concept of a “minimum viable product” isn’t the minimum product that compiles. It’s the least product that is the best tool in the world for some particular task or workflow.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Inadequate Equilibria

In the new view, human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse.

— Robert Wright, The Moral Animal

…in most circumstances, if you bring together a crowd of people, that crowd will, as a group, behave less intelligently, and less creatively, than any single member of the crowd is likely to do if on their own.

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

A solution that involves a eureka moment is generally very difficult, if not impossible, to derive systematically through a computation because it requires reasoning on a subtle level about objects and their properties.

— Martin Erwig, Once Upon an Algorithm

Great music is valid metaphysics.

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Maybe that’s precisely what quantum physics or metaphysics is telling us. If we exist, that means we’re being watched. There is something or someone that never lets us out of its sight.

— Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel, The Physics of Sorrow

Particularly when the organization is big, the pressure to run projects the same way everyone else does, so that they look correct even at the expense of being successful, is significant.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

It’s common for new initiatives to fail because existing employees don’t embrace them. But it’s lazy to blame the employees, when they probably had perfectly good reasons to withhold their support.

— Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai, Hack Your Bureaucracy

…how absolutely deranged it was, I now thought, for adults to command, and oppress, and tyrannize a child so, with complete disregard for his human nature. And for what? For some poorly conceived designs they for some reason have on his life! Oh, how many lies they told me about school. How many lies and falsities! From my most tender childhood, I was told (both in school and at home) that my entire life depends on it: that the grades I get in my seventh, eighth, ninth grade classes would determine my entire future. Oh, how many irrational fears they drilled into my mind! That I’d never get into college, that I’d never get a high paying job, unless I worked, and struggled, and crawled through the tunnels of their school curriculum.

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

Few of us want to be reminded that there is a hunk of dead animal on our plate when we are served a steak. Mostly, we protect ourselves by a coy use of language and an elaborate set of conventions that allow us to maintain a double standard. The true nature of meat eating, like the true nature of sex and excretion, is only easy to refer to implicitly, hidden in euphemistic synonyms and allusions: “veal cutlets,” “making love,” “going to the bathroom.” Somehow we sense that there is soul-killing going on in slaughterhouses, but our palates don’t want to be reminded of it.

— Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I

True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.

— Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

When Fred Brooks wrote that there were no order-of-magnitude gains, he missed something. There may not be any 10x gains, but there are certainly 10x losses.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

The main role of logic in reasoning, we suggest, may well be a rhetorical one: logic helps simplify and schematize intuitive arguments, highlighting and often exaggerating their force.

— Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

…people’s perception of risk is not static, and it’s often not connected to the probability of failure so much as it is the potential feeling of rejection and condemnation from their peers.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

When someone finds an excuse not to try to do better, they often refuse to concede that anyone else can try to do better, and every mode of improvement is thereafter their enemy, and every claim that it is possible to move forward is an offense against them.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

With the right people, any process works, and with the wrong people, no process works.

— Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle

The Pragmatic Investment Plan is based on a very simple but effective idea: model your knowledge portfolio with the same care as you would manage a financial investment portfolio.

— Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

…open source means that all the really engaging tasks are done for free…

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

…the ability to accurately read the desires and motivations of others is a hallmark of the successful psychopath and can be used for cruelty and exploitation.

— Paul Bloom, Against Empathy

The Leviathan Boghos Artinian 100 words I, a human being, thrive On cells, a hundred trillion strong! They all must strictly obey Commands in the genetic tongue That I may comfortably live And unencumbered behave, While each cell I ruthlessly hold, Until the day it dies, a slave! Yet I fail to understand That I also must bear the pain, Someday, of strictly obeying The alien commands in my brain That a leviathan may live And unencumbered behave, While me he would ruthlessly hold Until the day I die, a slave!

— Anja Publications, Philosophy Now

Brothers, love is a teacher, but a hard one to obtain: learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever. In anyone, even the wicked, love can be kindled by chance.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov

Asimov’s “The Relativity of Wrong”: When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

…the promotion of viewpoint diversity is nearly as superficial and dehumanizing as the forms of indoctrination it means to replace.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

…the one who doesn’t look the part, conditional on having made a (sort of) successful career in his profession, had to have much to overcome in terms of perception. And if we are lucky enough to have people who do not look the part, it is thanks to the presence of some skin in the game, the contact with reality that filters out incompetence, as reality is blind to looks.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

There just isn’t any good substitute for genuine curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires.

— Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way

…objections people raise are really requests for information in disguise.

— Janice Fraser, Jason Fraser, and Eric Ries, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama

Better, surely, not to pretend to calculate the incalculable, not to pretend that there is an Archimedean point outside the world whence everything is measurable and alterable; better to use in each context the methods that seem to fit it best, that give the (pragmatically) best results; to resist the temptations of Procrustes; above all to distinguish what is isolable, classifiable and capable of objective study, and sometimes of precise measurement and manipulation, from the most permanent, ubiquitous, inescapable, intimately present features of our world, which, if anything, are overfamiliar, so that their ‘inexorable’ pressure, being too much with us, is scarcely felt, hardly noticed, and cannot conceivably be observed in perspective, be an object of study.

— Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff, The Hedgehog and the Fox

…no mortal has the time or attention span to lay out every last premise and implication in an argument, so in practice almost all arguments are enthymemes.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call failings when we are at our most frightened).

— Adam Phillips, Barbara Taylor, On Kindness

Google’s massive, internal study of what distinguishes high-performing teams from low-performing ones: Not team cohesion, motivation, or average IQ, but rather frequent turn-taking in conversations and high social sensitivity toward what team members are thinking and feeling.

— David Komlos and David Benjamin, Cracking Complexity

I don’t do the thing where you figure out your life’s purpose and then come up with 5-year plans to support that, your 2-year plans to support your 5-year plans, and so on. You know what’s important to you, and if something is a priority you’re already doing it.

— Brennen Reece, Productivity for the Depressive Polymath

The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there’s no real culture left.

— Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning…Was the Command Line

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.

— Edsger W.Dijkstra, How Do We Tell Truths That Might Hurt?

Numerous “learn to code” boosters emphasize that “programming is fun.” I don’t agree; my sympathies are more in line with those expressed by Italian researcher Walter Vannini in his article “Coding Is Not ‘Fun’, It’s Technically and Ethically Complex.”

— Jonathan E. Steinhart, The Secret Life of Programs

Professional developers generally follow rules. They say that senior developers know when to break one (as they can justify the need to). On the other hand, it is said that very senior developers don’t break rules because it’s a waste of time having to keep explaining their reasons to others.

— Rafał Świdziński, Modern CMake for C++

I don’t practice what I preach because I’m not the kind of person I’m preaching to.

— Subgenius Foundation, Book of the Subgenius

there is in fact no logical path from ‘The world is not organised as I, if I were God, would have organised it’ to ‘God does not exist’. Any attempt to create such a path implies that a human being can imagine what it would be like to be God – and as Thomas Nagel pointed out, we can’t even imagine what it’s like to be a bat, never mind God.

— Martin Jenkins, Evil From the Outside

In big companies, the most telling evidence that meetings are essentially bankrupt is the prevalence of “pre-meetings.”

— Janice Fraser, Jason Fraser, and Eric Ries, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama

What do I care about all this beauty, when every minute, every second, I must and am forced to know that even this tiny fly that is now buzzing near me in a ray of sunlight, even it participates in this banquet and chorus, knows its place, loves it, and is happy, while I alone am a castaway, and only in my pusillanimity did not want to understand it till now!

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

A “spirituality” that sees cosmic meaning in the whims of fortune is not wise but foolish. The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don’t care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

But, friend, when you know certain things: these things lead to dispassion not to passion; to detachment not to bondage; to diminution not to accumulation; to having few wishes, not to having many wishes; to contentment not to discontent; to seclusion not to gregariousness; to the arousing of energy, not to indolence; to frugality not to luxurious living – of such things you can be certain.

— Thera Nyanaponika and Bhikkitu Bodhi, Numerical Discourses of the Buddha

Intellectual activity nurtures an inner life, a human core that is a refuge from suffering as much as it is a resource for reflection for its own sake.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

…the problem about programming is not that we haven’t found the right syntax for it but that people have to learn this unnatural act.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

The hard problems around legacy modernization are not technical problems; they’re people problems. The technology is usually pretty straightforward.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

Sympathy for all would be tyranny for thee, my good neighbor.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

The nameable goals of the socialist and even Marxist manifestos of the nineteenth century—public education, free health care, a government role in the economy, votes for women—have all been achieved, mostly peacefully and mostly successfully, by acts of reform in liberal countries. The attempt to achieve them by fiat and command, in the Soviet Union and China and elsewhere, created catastrophes, moral and practical, on a scale still almost impossible to grasp.

— Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories

As Fred Brooks argues, conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design, and if a system is to have it, one person must control the concepts…

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

…to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.’

— E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed

…isn’t the Minotaur merely the fruit of such sin, not a perpetrator, a victim, the most long-suffering victim?

— Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel, The Physics of Sorrow

You don’t think through another’s brain and you don’t work through another’s hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life.

— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

A second example of wishful thinking is to believe that learning how to program in a computer science course or a coding-intensive workshop will enable you to solve problems in any field that uses computation. No, you will need to learn something about the other field too.

— Peter J. Denning and Matti Tedre, Computational Thinking

…fear guards the line between the zone of excellence and the ultimate zone of genius.

— Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

Looking down into the bits, lesser engineers with larger egos might attempt to show off, to infuse the mechanism with art, to create some wonder of engineering, a gold inlaid, filigreed marvel of complexity. The inner strength of Heart’s team was its restraint, its maturity. This was no place for signature craftsmanship.

— Matthew Lyon and Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late

Large companies were originally skeptical about using open source software. Who would fix the bugs? This is somewhat ludicrous; if you’ve ever reported a bug to Microsoft, Apple, or any other large company, you know how much attention it gets.

— Jonathan E. Steinhart, The Secret Life of Programs

If we rely on cosmic blasts of cleverness to solve our problems, we’ll be waiting for eons. To get anything done, we need to convert the mystical into the mechanical, the fluid into the fixed, the ineffable into the plainly effable.

— Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant

…if you ever you find yourself thinking, “But you can’t prove me wrong.” If you’re going to ignore a probabilistic counterargument, why not ignore a proof, too?

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

What is man? A bridge between the ape and the Superman — a bridge over an abyss.

— F.W. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

‘The Soviet Union had remarkably little street crime when they were at their worst of their totalitarian, authoritarian controls. But, my God, at what price?’

— Hannah Fry, Hello World

Thanks to technology, we are probably as productive in two days as we previously were in five. But thanks to greed and some busy-bee syndrome of productivity, we are still asked to slave away for the profit of others ahead of our own nonremunerated ambitions.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Twenty years ago, computer science students at Stanford could rest easy knowing that their four years of training would prepare them for the job. Today, much of what they’ll learn is obsolete even before they graduate.

— Jonathan A. Levi, The Only Skill That Matters

…because our brains are part of nature, if we tend to exhibit regular behaviour, this means that nature itself must be equally regularity-oriented.

— Anja Publications, Philosophy Now

…worrying about evil AI is a bit like worrying about overcrowding on Mars.

— Hannah Fry, Hello World

Reshape yourself through the power of your will; never let yourself be degraded by self-will. The will is the only friend of the Self, and the will is the only enemy of the Self.

— Eknath Easwaran Ed., The Bhagavad Gita

The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us.

— Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

The best thing software can be is easy, but the way to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users’ choices.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

I will view all lands as though they belong to me, and my own as though they belonged to all humankind

— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

…the fact of the matter is that human ego is a very natural thing, and it is difficult to find people who can—or even should—divorce their ego from their work.

— Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

The crux of the problem, in my view, is that understanding language requires understanding the world, and a machine exposed only to language cannot gain such an understanding.

— What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?, Melanie Mitchell

…all Marx added to this was the idea of burning and punishing the Master Class here and now instead of waiting for “God” to attend to the matter post mortem.

— Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising

Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.

— T. S. Eliot, The Perfect Critic

If you can’t get teams to adopt proper code linting, your attempts to roll out a comprehensive quality program are doomed.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

What, after all, does daily social life consist in? A disparaging remark about another group; a rumor or story meant to draw outrage; a news story dug up by partisans seeking advantage; a crude expression of allegiance to an institution as flawed as its denigrated rivals. All of these are fundamental to the fabric of social life, especially in times when social life is unusually politicized…

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

Instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge through the Internet was supposed to educate and inform us, but instead it has created a society-wide poverty of attention.

— Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain

What disturbs and renders unhappy … the age of youth … is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises the constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness of our dreams hover before us in capriciously selected shapes and we search in vain for their original … Much would have been gained if through timely advice and instruction young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.

— Alain De Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

The generals and the captains of industry were quite right. There was nothing to be made of us intellectuals. We were a superfluous, irresponsible lot of talented chatterboxes for whom reality had no meaning.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

It is of course a fact that if art is love then art improves us morally, but this is, as it were accidental. The level at which that love works which is art is deeper than the level at which we deliberate concerning improvement. And indeed it is of the nature of love to be something deeper than our conscious and more simply social morality, and to be sometimes destructive of it. That is why all dictators, and would-be dictators… have mistrusted art

— Existentialists and Mystics, Iris Murdoch

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance. This implies that it is not correct to think of the opposite of violence as non-violence; to speak of non-violent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.

— On Violence, Hannah Arendt

…ease of code use is often inversely proportional to how reusable that code is.

— Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, and Patrick Kua, Building Evolutionary Architectures

You should know by now that programming is the grunt work needed to implement solutions to problems. Defining the problems and their solutions is the interesting and harder part.

— Jonathan E. Steinhart, The Secret Life of Programs

…more than most industries, tech companies seem to run on tropes and rituals that remind you of a tent revival: the mantra-like phrases, the messianic gurus, the cult of genius that barely manages to cover up its religious dimensions.

— Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking

…one finds religious people defending their beliefs by saying, “Well, you can’t justify your belief in science!” In other words, “How dare you criticize me for having unjustified beliefs, you hypocrite! You’re doing it too!”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

Studying the work and intellectual habits of a “genius” to learn from him is like studying the garb of a chef to emulate his cooking.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

…when the culture is unhealthy, it’s difficult or impossible to hire the one person who matters most, the one who doesn’t think like all the rest.

— Tom DeMarco, Tim Lister, Peopleware

If you have a good suite of tests and you are skilled at the discipline of refactoring, then the cost of adding a new feature and updating the design to support that new feature will almost certainly be smaller than the cost of implementing and maintaining all the hooks you might need one day.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Craftsmanship

Is what you are doing with computers worth doing? Because computers are such fascinating beasts, because programming is such a game, such a joy, we who program computers are in danger of becoming the unwitting pawns of those who would use our toys for not-so-playful ends.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

Philosophers used to debate how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Computer experts today debate how many transistors can be crammed into a microprocessor by means of this etching process.

— Michio Kaku, Visions

Moral questions are not decided by authorities or settled by fiat. Instead, in truth, we’re all sitting around in the moral fog together, trying to muddle through as best we can.

— Michael-John Turp, Who’s to Say?

…the Internet handled a great problem of space – it allowed us to communicate with anybody in the world, instantly. However, it did not make us better communicators. In fact, it took many poor communicators and gave them a massive platform on which they could spread hatred and fear.

— Max Kanat-Alexander, Understanding Software

Since no one can know everything, and most people know almost nothing, rationality consists of outsourcing knowledge to institutions that specialize in creating and sharing it, primarily academia, public and private research units, and the press.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

Thoughtlessness is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today’s world. For nowadays we take in everything in the quickest and cheapest way, only to forget it just as quickly.

— Martin Heidegger, Discourse on thinking

In 2018 Henry Kissinger warned that since deep learning systems don’t work on propositions we can examine and justify, they portend the end of the Enlightenment.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

Everybody is by their nature always acting in their own best interest; and it’s only the erratic fluctuations of their human minds and the misleading beliefs they acquire in the course of their lives that lead them to their failures and unvirtuous actions. Thus, no person has any reason to feel shame, guilt, or reproach for anything he ever did, because at the time he always had a perfectly valid and justifiable reason for doing it.

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

The Cantor set is indeed very special. It has an uncountable number of points – the total length of which is zero! – that can be found on a set of line segments!

— Haim Shapira, Eight Lessons on Infinity

It is no criterion of goodness in a puzzle that its outcome be intrinsically interesting or important.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Only in pure logic and mathematics can statements be deemed absolutely certain, but for this kind of truth a stupendous price is paid. The price is that such statements say nothing about the world.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

…books about ethics are twice as likely to go missing from university libraries than other books – indicating that in some ways moral philosophy students may actually behave worse than other students!

— Anja Publications, Philosophy Now

Though undoubtedly correct, the sentence, “Oxygen was discovered,” misleads by suggesting that discovering something is a single simple act assimilable to our usual (and also questionable) concept of seeing. That is why we so readily assume that discovering, like seeing or touching, should be unequivocally attributable to an individual and to a moment in time. But the latter attribution is always impossible, and the former often is as well.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

…in the wake of the deadliest war that the world had ever known one did not have to be a game theorist to favour preventing another – even by the brutal means of an atom-bombing campaign that left millions of Russians dead.

— Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man From the Future

I have individual subjects in whom apparent basic-need-gratification is compatible with “existential neurosis,” meaninglessness, valuelessness, or the like.

— Abraham H. Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

…the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you’re writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable. In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaningless, and that is no improvement at all.

— Jordan B. Peterson, Norman Doidge (Forward), Ethan Van Sciver (Illustrator), 12 Rules for Life

If you have a problem and believe that your title is the only thing holding you back, I want to reassure you that focusing on developing your approach and skills will be far more impactful than the title.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

…we can now be sure that the egg came first. This is because reproductive mutations separating a new species from its progenitor generally occur in reproductive rather than somatic DNA and are thus expressed in differences between successive generations, but not in the parent organisms themselves.

— Christopher Michael Langan and Chris Langan, The Art of Knowing

It borders on the impossible to write a program of any real complexity in C and not have a security problem.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

In examining the tasks of software development versus software maintenance, most of the tasks are the same—except for the additional maintenance task of “understanding the existing product.” This task consumes roughly 30 percent of the total maintenance time and is the dominant maintenance activity. Thus it is possible to claim that maintenance is a more difficult task than development.

— Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

Mathematics and logic were celebrated as the feature that distinguished humans from beasts—and now machines could do both.

— Peter J. Denning and Matti Tedre, Computational Thinking

Diversification doesn’t work as a strategy for the poor.

— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

You can’t automate excellence, though we will likely keep trying. It’s futile. Why? Because people are actually worth something.

— Dan Charnas, Everything in Its Place

…the 1966 Rosenthal-Jacobson study, in which students were given a fake aptitude test and their teachers were told which students were expected to “bloom” (when in reality the so-called good students were randomly selected). Over the next year, those students did better than their classmates.

— Francis Su, Mathematics for Human Flourishing

A good programmer should know a dozen or so languages.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Craftsmanship

…research as a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

A theorem is no more proved by logic and computation than a sonnet is written by grammar and rhetoric, or than a sonata is composed by harmony and counterpoint, or a picture painted by balance and perspective. Logic and computation, grammar and rhetoric, harmony and counterpoint, balance and perspective, can be seen in the work after it is created, but these forms are, in the final analysis, parasitic on, they have no existence apart from, the creativity of the work itself. Thus the relation of logic to mathematics is seen to be that of an applied science to its pure ground, and all applied science is seen as drawing sustenance from a process of creation with which it can combine to give structure, but which it cannot appropriate.

— George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form

…that’s not the point—you’re not here to write code; you’re here to ship products.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

A problem well put is half solved.

— Martin Erwig, Once Upon an Algorithm

the argument used by negationist politicians who claim that scientists act for political ends is remarkably interesting. A surreal inversion is established, where we believe dishonest scientists do politics, and honest politicians do science – a belief that is only possible in a dystopian and intentionally uninformed society.

— Marcos A. Raposo, Postmodern Flames in Brazil

There’s nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery. If there is only the hundredth part of a false note in candor, there is immediately a dissonance, and then—scandal. But with flattery, even if everything is false down to the last little note, it is still agreeable and is listened to not without pleasure; crude though the pleasure may be, it is still a pleasure.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

A hundred times I was upon the point of killing myself; but still I loved life. This ridiculous foible is perhaps one of our most fatal characteristics; for is there anything more absurd than to wish to carry continually a burden which one can always throw down? to detest existence and yet to cling to one’s existence? in brief, to caress the serpent which devours us, till he has eaten our very heart?

— Voltaire, Candide

…public school systems where students of all social classes were made to get up and march from room to room each hour at the sound of a bell, an arrangement self-consciously designed to train children for future lives of paid factory labor.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

…if you include the very people who will be affected in your decision-making process, change management becomes unimportant.

— Jim Whitehurst and Gary Hamel, The Open Organization

I saw that Haller was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius a boundless and frightful capacity for pain. I saw at the same time that the root of his pessimism was not world-contempt but self-contempt; for however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in his talk he never spared himself. It was always at himself first and foremost that he aimed the shaft, himself first and foremost whom he hated and despised.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

It is no disgrace for one striving for first place to stop at second or third. Among poets… there is room not only for Homer. And in philosophy, I am sure, the magnificence of Plato did not deter Aristotle of writing, and nor did the later, with all his breadth of knowledge, put an end to the studies of others.

— Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Orator

Some of those people are vendors selling reuse-in-the-large support products. Others are academics who understand very little about application domains and want to believe that domain-specific approaches aren’t necessary. There is a philosophical connection between these latter people and the one-size-fits-all tools and methodologists. They would like to believe that the construction of software is the same no matter what domain is being addressed. And they are wrong.

— Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

…the technology of computers changes constantly; every year it’s a struggle to keep up with the youngsters fresh out of school. What another of West’s old hands called “a long-term tiredness” can easily creep over computer engineers in their thirties.

— Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

Software is a compound word that means “flexible product.” The entire reason that software exists is so that we can quickly and easily change the behavior of our machines. To the extent that we build software that is hard to change, we thwart the very reason that software exists.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Craftsmanship

The three axes allow each tribe to assert moral superiority. The progressive asserts moral superiority by denouncing oppression and accusing others of failing to do so. The conservative asserts moral superiority by denouncing barbarism and accusing others of failing to do so. The libertarian asserts moral superiority by denouncing coercion and accusing others of failing to do so.

— Arnold Kling, The Three Languages of Politics

…being different is rarely a passport to good design.

— Richard Raffan, The Art of Turned Bowls

Of all types of human being, only the artist takes it upon him to say that he “cannot” work.

— George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Philosophy should take thoughts that are otherwise turbid and blurred, so to speak, and make them clear and sharp.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

…it’s almost impossible to get fired from a professional job—even pilot or surgeon—for mere incompetence, but very easy to get fired for defiance of accepted standards of external behavior, that is, for not properly playing the part.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

…it was Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, who first observed the phenomenon we now refer to as “compassion fatigue.” Human beings, he proposed, are normally inclined not only to imaginatively identify with their fellows, but as a result, to spontaneously feel one another’s joys and sorrows. The poor, however, are so consistently miserable that otherwise sympathetic observers are simply overwhelmed, and are forced, without realizing it, to blot out their existence entirely. The result is that while those on the bottom of a social ladder spend a great deal of time imagining the perspectives of, and genuinely caring about, those on the top, it almost never happens the other way

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the mind’s weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style. We need metaphors to derive a sense of what cannot be seen or touched, or else we will forget.

— Alain De Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

What is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

— Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

Anything that has to have science in its name isn’t a science.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

If I was truly smart, I should be able to figure out how to be happy, not wretched. Apparently, I didn’t know how to use “smart” to create “happy.”

— Gerald M. Weinberg, Fiona Charles, Keats Kirsch, Dani Weinberg, and Earl Everett, Weinberg on Writing

When there are rational grounds for an opinion, people are content to set them forth and wait for them to operate. In such cases, people do not hold their opinions with passion; they hold them calmly, and set forth their reasons quietly. The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction.

— Bertrand Russell, Let the People Think

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

I believe that it is right and proper for me, as a human being, to have an interest in the future, and what human civilization becomes in the future. One of those interests is the human pursuit of truth, which has strengthened slowly over the generations (for there was not always Science). I wish to strengthen that pursuit further, in this generation. That is a wish of mine, for the Future. For we are all of us players upon that vast gameboard, whether we accept the responsibility or not. And that makes your rationality my business.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

“Dr. Noah Smith, economics columnist for Bloomberg View, tells us, “The real danger of the ‘rise of the robots’ is not that they’ll take all our jobs, but that they’ll cause continually increasing inequality.”

— Kelly Weinersmith , Zach Weinersmith (Illustrator), Soonish

Plenty of decisions don’t get made because people believe they are entitled to keep talking, expressing opinions, and asking questions, even when most folks understand and agree on a direction.

— Janice Fraser, Jason Fraser, and Eric Ries, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama

You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Punishment and rewards are two sides of the same coin. Rewards have a punitive effect because they, like outright punishment, are manipulative. “Do this and you’ll get that” is not really very different from “Do this or here’s what will happen to you.” In the case of incentives, the reward itself may be highly desired; but by making that bonus contingent on certain behaviors, managers manipulate their subordinates, and that experience of being controlled is likely to assume a punitive quality over time.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

Lots of people are proposing and advocating new software development processes, but hardly anyone is evaluating them.

— Robert L. Glass and Tom DeMarco, Software Creativity 2.0

Why is it that we reward programmers who work all night to remove the errors they put into their programs, or managers who make drastic organizational changes to resolve the crises their poor management has created? Why not reward the programmers who design so well that they don’t have dramatic errors, and managers whose organizations stay out of crisis mode?

— Gerald Weinberg, Becoming a Technical Leader

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

Once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians.

— J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

As a general rule, the discretion to make decisions should be delegated to the people who must implement those decisions.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

The way you spend an average day indicates the way you’ll probably spend your life.

— Brennen Reece, Productivity for the Depressive Polymath

The ultimate act of disempowerment is to take away the responsibility for the schedule from those who must live by it. –Jim McCarthy…

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

The spiritualisation of sensuality is a great triumph over Christianity. A further triumph is our spiritualisation of enmity. This consists in our profound understanding of the value of having enemies: in short, our doing and deciding the opposite of what people previously thought and decided … Throughout the ages the church has wanted to destroy its enemies: we, the immoralists and anti-Christians, see it as to our advantage that the church exists … Even in the field of politics, enmity has become spiritualised. Almost every party sees that self-preservation is best served if the opposite number does not lose its powers. The same is true of Realpolitik. A new creation, such as the new Reich, needs enemies more than it does friends: only by being opposed does it feel necessary; only by being opposed does it become necessary. Our behaviour towards our ‘inner enemy’ is no different: here, too, we have spiritualised enmity; here, too, we have grasped its value.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

…social critic’s standard formula for sowing panic: Here’s an anecdote, therefore it’s a trend, therefore it’s a crisis.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

To be surprised at nothing, they say, is a sign of great intelligence; in my opinion, it might serve equally as a sign of great stupidity…

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

…it doesn’t matter what you are trying to become better at, if you only do the work when it’s convenient or exciting, then you’ll never be consistent enough to achieve remarkable results.

— James Clear, Atomic Habits

Perfectionism comes from either of two emotional sources: fear of failure, or despair over its impending arrival.

— Dan Charnas, Everything in Its Place

mankind have a little corrupted nature, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves; God has given them neither cannon of four-and-twenty pounders, nor bayonets; and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another. Into this account I might throw not only bankrupts, but Justice which seizes on the effects of bankrupts to cheat the creditors.

— Voltaire, Candide

…there is something that we have that they do not—that all-wise machine sitting there like a god in judgment of our work. When a patient recovers, it is the work of the doctor; when a patient dies, it is an act of God. But when a computer program doesn’t work, everyone knows—and everyone knows who is to blame.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

The reason why it may be wise to distrust the political judgment of scientists qua scientists is not primarily their lack of ‘character’ – that they did not refuse to develop atomic weapons – or their naïvete – that they did not understand that once these weapons were developed they would be the last to be consulted about their use – but precisely the fact that they move in a world where speech has lost its power

— Hannah Arendt , The Human Condition

[Deductive thinking] is a form of torture for the imaginatively gifted, the very totalitarianism of thought, one line being made to march strictly in step behind the other, all leading inexorably to a single undeviating conclusion. A proof out of Euclid recalls to my mind nothing so much as the troops goose-stepping before the Supreme Dictator. I have always delighted in my mind’s refusal to follow a single line of any mathematical explanation offered to me. Why should these exacting sciences exact anything from me? Or as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man shrewdly argues, “Good God, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if, for one reason or another, I don’t like these laws, including the ‘two times two is four’?” Dostoevsky spurned the hegemaniacal logic and I can do no less.

— Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Let consciousness be lit up by the will of a higher power, let it look at the world and say: “I am!” and let the higher power suddenly decree its annihilation, because for some reason—or even without explaining for what reason—that is needed: let it be so, I admit all that, but again comes the eternal question: why is my humility needed here? Isn’t it possible simply to eat me, without demanding that I praise that which has eaten me?

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

…three “Great Untruths.” These are the belief that people are fragile (“Anything that doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”), the belief in emotional reasoning (“Always trust your feelings”), and the belief in Us versus Them (“Life is a battle between good people and evil people”).

— Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories

Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.

— Angela Duckworth, Grit

…the dog boasts to the wolf all the contraptions of comfort and luxury he has, almost prompting the wolf to enlist. Until the wolf asks the dog about his collar and is terrified when he understands its use. “Of all your meals, I want nothing.” He ran away and is still running…

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

Without the transcendent and the transpersonal, we get sick, violent, and nihilistic, or else hopeless and apathetic. We need something “bigger than we are” to be awed by and to commit ourselves to in a new, naturalistic, empirical, non-churchly sense.

— Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being

The empty space left behind by one obsession can always be taken up by another.

— Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel, The Physics of Sorrow

Scientists start out doing work that’s perfect, in the sense that they’re just trying to reproduce work someone else has already done for them. Eventually, they get to the point where they can do original work. Whereas hackers, from the start, are doing original work; it’s just very bad. So hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

A society without mathematical affection is like a city without concerts, parks, or museums. To miss out on mathematics is to live without an opportunity to play with beautiful ideas and see the world in a new light. To grasp mathematical beauty is a unique and sublime experience that everyone should demand.

— Francis Su, Mathematics for Human Flourishing

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The development of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century further disproved the conception of the individual as being entirely rational. It revealed the preponderant role of the subconscious, undermining the claims both that rationality is the defining feature of humanity, and that we are capable of pure, unbiased abstraction. It is now well-known that humans are contaminated by a long list of cognitive biases

— Manon Royet, French Philosophy Now

…being able to get a machine to do what you want is the closest thing we’ve got in technology to adolescent wish-fulfillment.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one’s native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.

— Edsger W.Dijkstra, How Do We Tell Truths That Might Hurt?

Ontology, metaphysics, and epistemology are unlikely to bring much to the table – apart from (alas, well-hidden) examples of rigour and transparency in argument. These jewels in philosophy’s crown have to be content with their status as ends in themselves, bringing pleasure and illumination to those who are lucky enough to have the time and freedom from want, and the inclination, to engage in philosophical reflection.

— Anja Publications, Philosophy Now

Software engineering has this in common with having children: the labor before the birth is painful and difficult, but the labor after the birth is where you actually spend most of your effort.

— Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy, Site Reliability Engineering

Still, hunter-gatherer religions have at least two features that are found, in one sense or another, in all the world’s great religions: they try to explain why bad things happen, and they thus offer a way to make things better.

— Robert Wright, The Evolution of God

The intelligentsia therefore feels entitled to deal with the poor as a construct; one they created. Thus they become convinced that they know what is best for them.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

…none of us, thinking alone, is rational enough to consistently come to sound conclusions: rationality emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other’s fallacies.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings.

— Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking

Remember, no one wants to suck at their job. Popular culture sells the myth about lazy, stupid, uncaring bureaucrats. It’s easy to dismiss people that way. Buying into the idea that those kinds of problems are really character flaws means you don’t have to recognize that you’ve created an environment where people feel trapped. They are caught between conflicting incentives with no way to win.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

At its core, all engineering comes down to making tradeoffs between the perfect and the workable.

— Matthew Lyon, Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late

…flimsy knowledge about the criteria of beauty does not render futile the task of distinguishing good from bad art.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

Users become attached to their programs and system software. Software is expensive. Getting it to function properly often takes time. Software that works is precious. Users don’t idly discard it.

— Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

For people are no longer owned by a company but by something worse: the idea that they need to be employable. The employable person is embedded in an industry, with fear of upsetting not just their employer, but other potential employers

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

we quickly forget the names of modern internet ‘heroes’, because tomorrow new ones will take their place. We may also forget that our own names and lives are just as fleeting, as we stubbornly try to engrave them in the world of social networks. We somehow believe that if enough people hear about us, our lives will matter.

— Maryna Lazareva, Virtual Dissolution

If there are biased reasons to say the Sun is shining, that doesn’t make it dark out.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

Your success as a company isn’t measured in activity or effort put in, but in results. Why not manage your teams the same way?

— Brian Elliott, Sheela Subramanian, Helen Kupp, and Stewart Butterfield, How the Future Works

Art is a selective re-creation of reality

— Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto

If someone can suffer more, it means he’s worthy of suffering more.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

If we’re spending a lot of time second-guessing someone’s domain expertise and decision-making, then maybe they’re the wrong person.

— Janice Fraser, Jason Fraser, and Eric Ries, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama

…some of today’s florid outbursts of irrationality may be understood as the rational pursuit of goals other than an objective understanding of the world.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

When it comes to our actions, disorder and distraction are death. The unordered mind loses track of what’s in front of it—what matters—and gets distracted by thoughts of the future.

— Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way

…intelligence is not the same thing as rationality, since being good at computing something is no guarantee that a person will try to compute the right things. Rationality also requires reflectiveness, open-mindedness, and mastery of cognitive tools like formal logic and mathematical probability.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

Humanists often contend that machines tend to dehumanize people by forcing them to have rigid personalities, but really, the contrary is true. Because the machines are rigid, the people who use them must—if they are to be successful—supply more than their share of flexibility.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

Two sages were standing on a bridge over a stream. One said to the other, “I wish I were a fish. They are so happy!” The second replied, “How do you know whether fish are happy or not?” You’re not a fish.” The first said, “But you’re not me, so how do you know whether I know how fish feel?”

— Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I

The natural enemies of this spirit are cleverness and specialisation: hence the contempt so rightly shown for, in the Roman world, experts and technicians – the Graeculus esuriens – the remote but unmistakable ancestors of the sharp, wizened figures of the modern Alexandrian Age – the terrible Eighteenth Century – all the avocasserie and écrivasserie, the miserable crew of attorneys and scribblers, with the predatory, sordid, grinning figure of Voltaire at their head, destructive and self-destructive, because blind and deaf to the true word of God.

— Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff, The Hedgehog and the Fox

He means the same thing Kelly Johnson did: if something is ugly, it can’t be the best solution. There must be a better one, and eventually someone else will discover it.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

If just one or two engineers are getting something wrong, adding to everyone’s mental load by creating new rules doesn’t scale.

— Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright, Software Engineering at Google

Many of the dramas of human social life—the sagas of sympathy, trust, favor, debt, revenge, gratitude, guilt, shame, treachery, gossip, reputation—may be understood as the playing of strategies in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

Teaching a company to value something it doesn’t care about is the hardest sort of work you can do, and it often fails, so you should do as little of it as you can, but no less.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

Simple does not mean easy. Simple means untangled, and untangling things is hard.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Craftsmanship

People want the chance to do what they naturally do best every day. Because weaknesses never turn into strengths, but strengths develop continually with practice.

— Gallup.com, How to Create a Strengths- Based Company Culture

…history abounds with lessons on the price of being the first, or even the second, to say that the Emperor has no clothes.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

Engineer and mathematician Adrian Bowyer first conceived the idea he calls ‘Darwinian Marxism’ in 2004 – that eventually everyone’s home will be a factory, producing anything they want (as long as it can be made out of plastic, anyway).

— Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man From the Future

Self-organization produces heterogeneity and unpredictability. It is likely come up with whole new structures, whole new ways of doing things. It requires freedom and experimentation, and a certain amount of disorder. These conditions that encourage self-organization often can be scary for individuals and threatening to power structures.

— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

…there is certainly an argument that much of human creativity – like the products of the ‘composing’ algorithms – is just a novel combination of pre-existing ideas.

— Hannah Fry, Hello World

‘Spooky action at a distance’ works for moral judgements, too: as we saw, judging something as ‘bad’ instantly applies that same label to identical situations or behaviours, however far away they may be. So a judgement in one place has an instant impact on a twin situation even if it is a great distance away, and there is no direct connection between the two.

— Myles King, Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics

Only an individual programmer can resolve code complexity.

— Max Kanat-Alexander, Understanding Software

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom–Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , The Communist Manifesto

That’s the difference between an error and an anomaly - an error is incorrect behavior, while an anomaly is unexpected behavior. If you were smarter, you’d expect the anomalies to occur.

— Mikito Takada, Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit

If I work for the sake of money, spend money on basic necessities for life, and organize my life around working, then my life is a pointless spiral of work for the sake of work.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the American poverty rate has declined by ninety percent since 1960, from 30 percent of the population to just 3 percent.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

Bureaucratic structures are resistant to change, for better (resisting external corruption or authoritarian leaders) and for worse (failing to adapt fast enough to meet customer and employee needs).

— Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai, Hack Your Bureaucracy

Freedom is measured by the (logical) distance between one’s aspirations and the expectations inflicted on one by Others

— Mariam Thalos, A Social Theory of Freedom

We also know the kind of ill mental health and neurosis that can arise in the person who attempts to guard against his subconscious compulsions at all costs, by means of only his conscious faculties.

— Roman Gelperin, Addiction, Procrastination, and Laziness

Call no man happy until he is dead

— Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

…the primary factor preventing the adoption of an impactful Staff-plus role is the fear of creating a tyrannical architect.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other.

— James Baldwin, If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?

How much energy do they have to fight for or defend the fact that 2 + 2 = 4 (the arithmetic axiom most people think of)? Usually they observe that they have very little energy to fight for the rightness of their belief. Why? From our perspective, it’s because they know they are right and don’t need to defend this law as though their identity or ego depended on it. Next, we ask the same leaders to bring to mind an “issue” that they are fighting to be right about at work or in their private lives. It doesn’t take them long to find one. When we invite them to notice the difference between their need to defend, justify, and explain why they are right about this issue and their need to defend 2 + 2 = 4, they often have an epiphany.

— Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

…the idea isn’t that evil is good; rather, it’s that evil is done by those who think they are doing good.

— Paul Bloom, Against Empathy

I cannot for the life of me understand why, while people without driver’s licenses are not allowed on public roads, in bookstores one can find any number of books by persons without decency—let alone knowledge.

— Stanislaw Lem, Seth Shostak, and Michael Kandel, His Master’s Voice

Developers can be motivated by technically inept managers as long as those managers recognize that they are technically inept and confine their control of the project to nontechnical decisions.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

“Standards should be discovered, not decreed,” said one computer scientist in the TCP/IP faction. Seldom has it worked any other way.

— Matthew Lyon, Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

— G. K. Chesterton , Orthodoxy

The more happiness research I read, the more it starts to look as though we might all get a better happiness return from sitting in the pub with our friends, bitching about meditation, rather than by actually practicing it.

— Ruth Whippman, America the Anxious

In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state-loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

through religion all men get a little of what a few privileged souls possess in full.

— Henry Bergson, Two Sources of Morality and Religion

…people being divided generally, according to the law of nature, into two categories: a lower one, ordinary people, who are, so to speak, material serving solely for the reproduction of their own kind; and people proper—that is, those who have the gift or talent of speaking a new word in their environment. The subdivisions here are naturally endless, but the distinctive features of both categories are quite marked: people of the first, or material, category are by nature conservative, staid, live in obedience, and like being obedient. In my opinion they even must be obedient, because that is their purpose, and for them there is decidedly nothing humiliating in it. Those of the second category all transgress the law, are destroyers or inclined to destroy, depending on their abilities. The crimes of these people, naturally, are relative and variegated; for the most part they call, in quite diverse declarations, for the destruction of the present in the name of the better.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

To take something seriously is to make that thing a referendum on who you are; on your value and worth as a human being. To take something seriously is to invest that something with the ability to determine whether you matter. You’re giving that something the ability to provide you with, or keep you from, experiencing ultimate security.

— Jim Dethmer, Conscious Competition

The entire earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be immolated without end.

— St Petersburg Dialogues, Joseph De Maistre

If the Defense Department pays a thousand dollars for toilet seats, it’s partly because it costs a lot to sell toilet seats for a thousand dollars.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Working overtime is not a way to show your dedication to your employer. What it shows is that you are a bad planner, that you agree to deadlines to which you shouldn’t agree, that you make promises you shouldn’t make, that you are a manipulable laborer and not a professional.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Agile

Since ongoing Russian terror is the price Ukrainians pay for their courage, it is outright perverse for us to use it in the satisfaction of our own psychological needs.

— Maurits de Jongh, Hannah Arendt: On the Spectre of Nuclear War

The findings from the “State of DevOps” report say that one of the leading predictors of high performance, measured in terms of throughput and stability, is the ability of teams to make their own decisions without the need to ask permission of anyone outside the team.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

Formal proof of correctness is usually infeasible; abandoning all effort at systematic verification (the more common extreme) is dangerous…

— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design

“No,” said the priest, “you don’t have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary.” “A depressing opinion,” said K. “Lies are made into a universal system.”

— Franz Kafka, The Trial

mystic to the nihilist, is smaller than that from the butterfly to the larva, ‘The distance’, wrote Sorel, ‘from the theocrat to the mystic, and from the from the larva to the chrysalis, from the chrysalis to the butterfly.’

— Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff, The Hedgehog and the Fox

The feeling of free will has been called an “epiphenomenon,” a psychological by-product of events that has no more influence on the universe, as it goes its predetermined way, than a rainbow has on the sun or on falling drops of rain.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it’s not true. You feel this when you start to design things.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

…many psychologists are inept at identifying gifted children as well. I recently heard of a child psychologist who claimed that all the children whose parents regard as gifted are typically children with behavioural disorders.

— Andreas Hofer and Adrienn Raczi, Born Different

The more reusable code is, the less usable it is.

— Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, and Patrick Kua, Building Evolutionary Architectures

…the best flying team has three components: a pilot, a computer and a dog. The computer is there to fly the plane, the pilot is there to feed the dog. And the dog is there to bite the human if it tries to touch the computer.

— Hannah Fry, Hello World

Gerald Weinberg points out that marketers tend to be 10 years older and negotiate for a living—that is, they tend to be seasoned, professional negotiators (Weinberg 1994). The deck is stacked against developers during schedule negotiations.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

Karl Weierstrass once said that a mathematician who is not a bit of a poet will never be a good mathematician.

— Haim Shapira, Eight Lessons on Infinity

The vast majority (90% or more) of programmers have absolutely no idea what they are doing.

— Max Kanat-Alexander, Understanding Software

In some ways, programming is like painting. You start with a blank canvas and certain basic raw materials. You use a combination of science, art, and craft to determine what to do with them. You sketch out an overall shape, paint the underlying environment, then fill in the details. You constantly step back with a critical eye to view what you’ve done. Every now and then you’ll throw a canvas away and start again. But artists will tell you that all the hard work is ruined if you don’t know when to stop. If you add layer upon layer, detail over detail, the painting becomes lost in the paint.

— Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer

…expensive objects can feel like plausible solutions to needs we don’t understand.

— Alain De Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

There is no way to do partial TDD; it is an all-or-nothing discipline.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Craftsmanship

The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without conflict, and the beauty which the ageless mountains present to senses tried by the kaleidoscopic rush of events.

— Morris Kline, Mathematics for the Nonmathematician

The world was divided in two—good vs. bad, ours vs. yours. We, as luck would have it, had ended up our side, hence that of “the good guys.”

— Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel, The Physics of Sorrow

We can go absolutely nowhere in argument without the laws of logic. However, these laws cannot themselves be proven, for we would have to presuppose them in order to construct an argument for them!

— Noah Harris, Ergoing Nowhere

…there is nothing more vexing, for instance, than to be rich, of respectable family, of decent appearance, of rather good education, not stupid, even kind, and at the same time to have no talent, no particularity, no oddity even, not a single idea of one’s own, to be decidedly “like everybody else.” There is wealth, but not a Rothschild’s; an honorable family, but which has never distinguished itself in any way; a decent appearance, but very little expression; a proper education, but without knowing what to apply it to; there is intelligence, but with no ideas of one’s own; there is a heart, but with no magnanimity, etc., etc., in all respects. There are a great many such people in the world and even far more than it seems; they are divided, as all people are, into two main categories: one limited, the other “much cleverer.” The first are happier. For the limited “usual” man, for instance, there is nothing easier than to imagine himself an unusual and original man and to revel in it without any hesitation.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

You can make the case that all creative endeavors are about pushing against constraints. In the words of physicist Richard Feynman, “Creativity is imagination in a straitjacket.”

— Ben Orlin, Math With Bad Drawings

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.

— George Orwell,, Down and Out in Paris and London…

…find out what they’re excited about. That’s kind of a basic threshold for me. And it doesn’t matter whether it has anything to do with programming or computers. If they can’t get enthusiastic about something, they’re not going to get charged up in a group.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

The history of Earth up until now has been a history of optimizers spinning their wheels at a constant rate, generating a constant optimization pressure. And creating optimized products, not at a constant rate, but at an accelerating rate, because of how object-level innovations open up the pathway to other object-level innovations. But that acceleration is taking place with a protected meta level doing the actual optimizing.

— Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate

Schrödinger was the first of the quantum theoreticians to express sympathy with the Upanishads and eastern philosophical thought. A growing body of literature now embodies this perspective, including two popular works, The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and the Dancing Wu Li masters by Gary Zukav.

— Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I

What I have learned, working here, is that smart, successful people are cursed. The curse is confidence. It’s confidence that comes from a lifetime of success after real success, an objectively great job, working at an objectively great company, making a measurably great salary, building products that get millions of users. You must be smart. In fact, you are smart. You can prove it.

— Avery Pennarun, The Curse of Smart People

If you can’t build a monolith, what makes you think microservices are the answer?

— Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, and Patrick Kua, Building Evolutionary Architectures

…no logical argument can establish a moral claim. But an argument can establish that a claim under debate is inconsistent with another claim a person holds dear, or with values like life and happiness that most people claim for themselves and would agree are legitimate desires of everyone else.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

A good programming language should have features that make the kind of people who use the phrase “software engineering” shake their heads disapprovingly.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

…it is possible to be both ethical and universalist. In theory, yes, but, sadly, not in practice.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

…we libertarians worry that Hobbes’ social contract can evolve into a state Leviathan that wields so much power that we have even fewer liberties than in the original state of nature.

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

…legacy modernization is less about technical implementation and more about the morale of the team doing the modernizing.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies and lies…

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

St. Augustine’s “love God and do as you will” can be easily translated, “Be healthy and then you may trust your impulses.”

— Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality

I believe “a science of design” to be an impossible and indeed misleading goal.

— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design

To make the growth choice instead of the fear choice a dozen times a day is to move a dozen times a day toward self-actualization. Self-actualization is an ongoing process; it means making each of the many single choices about whether to lie or be honest, whether to steal or not steal at a particular point, and it means to make each of these choices as a growth choice. This is movement toward self-actualization.

— Abraham Maslow, Farther Reaches of Human Nature

…today’s educated workforce is full of philosophy or Renaissance literature majors who believe they are cut out for better things. They consider being a mere cog in administrative machinery beneath their dignity.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

The average behavior of the market participant will not allow us to understand the general behavior of the market.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

Contrary to some people’s instincts, leaders who admit mistakes are more respected, not less.

— Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright, Software Engineering at Google

…consciousness is nothing but the upper end of a spectrum of self-perception levels that brains automatically possess as a result of their design.

— Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

What are great men? They are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified in their name than recognise their own insignificance and impotence in the cosmic flow which pursues its course irrespective of their wills and ideals.

— Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff, The Hedgehog and the Fox

Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

It is easy, during a review, to review the work product from the point of view of what your own solution approach would be, rather than the solution approach chosen by the developer.

— Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

…one thing that’s really important is to not be afraid of your ignorance.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

…the originator of the Doomsday Clock, Eugene Rabinowitch, came to regret his movement’s strategy: “While trying to frighten men into rationality, scientists have frightened many into abject fear or blind hatred.”

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

An ounce of information is worth a pound of data. An ounce of knowledge is worth a pound of information. An ounce of understanding is worth a pound of knowledge. And an ounce of wisdom is worth a pound of understanding.

— David Komlos and David Benjamin, Cracking Complexity

Isn’t it true that whatever isn’t determined by our genes must be determined by our environment? What else is there? There’s Nature and there’s Nurture. Is there also some X, some further contributor to what we are? There’s Chance. Luck. This extra ingredient is important but doesn’t have to come from the quantum bowels of our atoms or from some distant star. It is all around us in the causeless coin-flipping of our noisy world, automatically filling in the gaps of specification left unfixed by our genes, and unfixed by salient causes in our environment.

— Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves

…the lack of software skill never was the problem. Lack of managerial skill was always the problem; lack of software skill was merely a convenient excuse for those managers who lacked esteem.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

…there is a conspiracy that you can find online: It is the one to keep you online, looking for conspiracies.

— Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

Gödel’s work was seen as a reaffirmation of Platonism and, more recently a proof of the impossibility of Artificial Intelligence.

— Philip Stokes, Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers

System administrators can become cranky and unresponsive because they’re not directly exposed to competitive pressure. A salesman has to deal with customers, and a developer has to deal with competitors’ software, but a system administrator, like an old bachelor, has few external forces to keep him in line.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

You simply can’t thrive in a state of constant daily evaluation of the truth-conduciveness of your social world, any more than a flowering plant can flourish if its owner digs up its roots every morning to see how it’s doing.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

Poverty needs no explanation; it is the natural state of humankind. What needs an explanation is wealth. For most of human history, around 90 percent of humanity lived in what we today call extreme poverty. In 2020, less than 9 percent do…

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

So, you want to be an expert? You need to budget about ten years of effort, regardless of the subject area.

— Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

I do not know, I cannot imagine, any group which does not include among its current ideas an enormous dose of lies. That being the case, the alternative is inevitable: either one must like falsehood, or one must dislike the familiar setting of daily life.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Another common, costly mistake is to build a complex infrastructure and use industrial-strength tools for a project that doesn’t need them.

— Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design

I have, indeed, been taking offense all my life because I enjoyed it and felt it was beautiful. It is not only pleasurable, it is also esthetically satisfying to feel offended.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov

You may have to use a dozen tools and websites to handle the various logistical aspects of software development, and soon the triumph starts to wear a little thin. Add another dozen software libraries and frameworks that you may use internally in your programs—again, each one comes bristling with its own eccentricities, bugs, and books—and weariness sets in. Each tool and preconstructed library solves a problem that you must otherwise solve yourself, but each solution is a separate body of knowledge you must maintain.

— Vikram Chandra, Geek Sublime

What do people need to be good developers?

• Basic safety—freedom from hunger, physical harm, and threats to loved ones. Fear of job loss threatens this need.
• Accomplishment—the opportunity and ability to contribute to their society.
• Belonging—the ability to identify with a group from which they receive validation and accountability and contribute to its shared goals.
• Growth—the opportunity to expand their skills and perspective.
• Intimacy—the ability to understand and be understood deeply by others.

— Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres, Extreme Programming Explained

Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped from birth in electronic media directed and controlled by book-reading Morlocks. That many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we’ve evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious, and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands.

— Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning…Was the Command Line

…the safest policy is simply not to give an off-the-cuff estimate. You never know how far it will travel, and it’s futile to try to put conditions on it…

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

Understanding the web browser also teaches us something about system design, which is arguably more important than programming…

— Jonathan E. Steinhart, The Secret Life of Programs

When those far removed from the creation of wealth — undergraduates, reporters, politicians — hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

If you’re going to capture everything, you might as well capture nothing.

— Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain

Knowledge is power, and you should give power to those who have the knowledge.

— Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble, Gene Kim, Accelerate

…the danger doesn’t lie in doing something wrong; it lies in doing nothing at all.

— Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

Anyone may be a hero: their response, not the circumstances themselves, determines it.

— Stephen Anderson, Hap & Happiness

Universities and research labs force hackers to be scientists, and companies force them to be engineers.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

…postmodern Theory seeks not to be factually true but to be strategically useful: in order to bring about its own aims, morally virtuous and politically useful by its own definitions.

— Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories

Have you noticed how some project teams are efficient, with everyone knowing what to do and contributing fully, while the members of other teams are constantly bickering and don’t seem able to get out of each other’s way? Often this is an orthogonality issue. When teams are organized with lots of overlap, members are confused about responsibilities. Every change needs a meeting of the entire team, because any one of them might be affected.

— Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer

nothing straight can be fashioned out of the crooked timber of humanity

— Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Effective training in critical thinking and cognitive debiasing may not be enough to cure identity-protective cognition, in which people cling to whatever opinion enhances the glory of their tribe and their status within it. This is the disease with the greatest morbidity in the political realm, and so far scientists have misdiagnosed it, pointing to irrationality and scientific illiteracy instead of the myopic rationality of the Tragedy of the Belief Commons.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

…human brain is but a finite machine, therefore there are only finitely many propositions which you believe. Let us label these propositions p1, p2, …, pn, where n is the number of propositions you believe. So you believe each of these propositions p1, p2, …, pn. Yet, unless you are conceited, you know that you sometimes make mistakes, hence not everything you believe is true. Therefore, if you are not conceited, you know that at least one of the propositions p1, p2, …, pn is false. Yet you believe each of the propositions p1, p2, …, pn. This is straight inconsistency.

— Raymond M. Smullyan, What Is the Name of This Book?

Software development is more valuable when it earns money sooner and spends money later. Incremental design explicitly defers design investment until the last responsible moment in an effort to spend money later.

— Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, Extreme Programming Explained

If Lenin walked around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he’d think communism had won. Everyone would be wearing the same clothes, have the same kind of office (or rather, cubicle) with the same furnishings, and address one another by their first names instead of by honorifics. Everything would seem exactly as he’d predicted, until he looked at their bank accounts.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

I think Thompson and Ritchie did the world a disservice by not defining the pretty-print presentation for C. Saying, “This is how we do it, but you can do it some other way,” has had a huge toll on humanity, and it will probably continue to always have one.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

While some on the far right might want to halt progress or even consider it to have gone too far already, and some on the far left consider progress a myth and insist that life in liberal democracies is still as oppressive as it ever has been (thanks, Foucault), liberalism both appreciates progress and is optimistic that it will continue.

— Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories

Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.

— Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die

Product design and release processes cannot turn good designers into great ones. They rarely produce great designs without a great designer. But the disciplines imposed can bring up the low end of the design curve and improve the average performance of the art.

— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design

your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life …. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

— Samuel H. Barondes, Making Sense of People

Why such a whale became thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for however peculiar in that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly valuable oil.

— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Our biological essence, our instinct remnants, are weak and subtle, and they are hard to get at. Learnings of the extrinsic sort are more powerful than our deepest impulses. These deepest impulses in the human species, at the points where the instincts have been lost almost entirely, where they are extremely weak, extremely subtle and delicate, where you have to dig to find them, this is where I speak of introspective biology, of biological phenomenology, implying that one of the necessary methods in the search for self, the search for spontaneity and for naturalness is a matter of closing your eyes, cutting down the noise, turning off the thoughts, putting away all busyness, just relaxing in a kind of Taoistic and receptive fashion.

— Abraham Maslow, Farther Reaches of Human Nature

Bits that are embodied as structure (varying in space, invariant across time) we perceive as memory, and bits that are embodied as sequence (varying in time, invariant across space) we perceive as code. Gates are the intersections where bits span both worlds at the moments of transition from one instant to the next.

— George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral

Who advocates in the requirements process for the product itself—its conceptual integrity, its efficiency, its economy, its robustness? Often, no one. As often, an architect or engineer who can offer only opinion based on taste and instinct, unbuttressed as yet by facts.

— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design

Next I suggest that YOU get to decide what’s a game and what isn’t, what needs to be taken seriously and what doesn’t. Life doesn’t come prelabeled as serious and not serious. You are the labeler.

— Jim Dethmer, Conscious Competition

Kant seems to argue that dignity flows from and is thus conceptually subordinate to autonomy, which he takes to be the central feature giving humans moral value.

— Anja Publications, Philosophy Now

All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for.

— Walter Scheidel, Enlightenment Now

My fundamental premise about the brain is that all its workings – what we sometimes call “mind” – are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology and nothing more.

— Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden

Fragility: we have been progressively separating human courage from warfare, allowing wimps with computer skills to kill people without the slightest risk to their lives.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

…it takes is a very small number of detractors using misplaced buzzwords of the type that makes people cringe (such as “racist”) to scare an entire institution.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

Stakhanovism’s essence was a new form of individuality, of self-involvement in work. And it is this form that now finds its home as much in offices, executive suites, corporate campuses, as in schools and universities. Stakhanovism has become a movement of the individual soul.

— Bogdan Costea, Today’s management-speak has a lot in common with 1930s Soviet propaganda—and it’s making people miserable

Vim is the only thing proven to make you awesome.

— David Bryant Copeland, SOLID Is Not Solid

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with your hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

— Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote

…unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. Anything that upsets the weak manager is almost by definition unprofessional.

— Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, Peopleware

What this has taught me I think all of us had better learn. There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist creators, seers, sages, saints, shakers, and movers. This can certainly give us hope for the future of the species even if they are uncommon and do not come by the dozen. And yet these very same people can at times be boring, irritating, petulant, selfish, angry, or depressed. To avoid disillusionment with human nature, we must first give up our illusions about it.

— Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality

When we’re focused on the search for truth, we’ll begin by doubting the existence of the objects of sense-perception and imagination. There are two reasons for this: (1) We have occasionally found our senses to be in error, and it’s not wise to place much trust in anyone or anything that has deceived us even once. (2) In our sleep we regularly seem to see or imagine things that don’t exist anywhere; and while we are doubting there seem to be no absolutely reliable criteria to distinguish being asleep from being awake.

— Rene Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy

Millions of pages of Inspector General reports can attest that when a government bureaucracy finds a broken rule, like Medusa it grows three more rules in its place.

— Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai, Hack Your Bureaucracy

…all they need to do is change the culture, rules, and practices that they have spent years building and that have always made them successful in the past. Yeesh.

— Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud

Modern technology can be complex, but complexity by itself is neither good nor bad: it is confusion that is bad. Forget the complaints against complexity; instead, complain about confusion.

— Donald A. Norman, Living With Complexity

But the question whether the disease generates the crime, or the crime somehow by its peculiar nature is always accompanied by something akin to disease, he did not yet feel able to resolve.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

…intelligence is one of life’s most effective instruments for masking inborn traits, once it decides that such a course is desirable.

— Stanislaw Lem, Seth Shostak, and Michael Kandel, His Master’s Voice

Looking for absolute truths in situations that are ambiguous and value-based is painful. Sometimes it helps just to highlight the fact that the disagreement is really over what to optimize for, rather than pure technical correctness.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

I think like an academic egghead, believing that if I write enough paragraphs about a scary subject, give enough lectures about it, it will give up and go away quietly. And if everyone took enough classes about the biology of violence and studied hard, we’d all be able to take a nap between the snoozing lion and lamb. Such is the delusional sense of efficacy of a professor.

— Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave

…to try to specify all that a program should do, you get specifications that are themselves so complicated that you’re no longer confident that they say what you intended.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

Indeed, one could well argue that fascism simply took the idea that workers and managers had common interests, that organizations like corporations or communities formed organic wholes, and that financiers were an alien, parasitical force, and drove them to their ultimate, murderous extreme.

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

We don’t start out with a moral duty to “reduce bias,” simply because biases are bad and evil and Just Not Done. This is the sort of thinking someone might end up with if they acquired a deontological duty of “rationality” by social osmosis, which leads to people trying to execute techniques without appreciating the reason for them.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Map and Territory

I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from I resolve to make tomorrow better. The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.

— Angela Duckworth, Grit

Religion isn’t so much about telling man that there is one God as about preventing man from thinking that he is God.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

I asked a friend, whose code I admire, if he had any recommendations to demonstrate the importance of cohesion, and he recommended the Sesame Street YouTube video, “One of these things is not like another.”

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

…one study of large internet services found that configuration errors by operators were the leading cause of outages, whereas hardware faults (servers or network) played a role in only 10–25% of…

— Martin Kleppmann, Designing Data-Intensive Applications

…as a source of organic order, a master plan is both too precise, and not precise enough. The totality is too precise: the details are not precise enough.

— Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design

“I dropped out of graduate school because postmodernism was then coming into academia,” Craig explained to me, “and it didn’t seem worthwhile to go through all of the hard work of science and present all the evidence, just to have it dismissed by [someone] saying, ‘Well, that’s just your narrative.’”

— Alice Dreger, Galileo’s Middle Finger

…for the best programming at the least cost, give the best possible programmers you can find sufficient time so you need the smallest number of them.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

When a process expert can tell me how to work, but doesn’t share in that work or its consequences, authority and responsibility are misaligned.

— Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, Extreme Programming Explained

Bureaucracy was invented to maximize control, coordination, and consistency—things that are essential to reliability and efficiency but aren’t the hallmarks of online communities and open innovation projects.

— Jim Whitehurst and Gary Hamel, The Open Organization

Developers understand the benefits of everything and the tradeoffs of nothing!

— Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, and Patrick Kua, Building Evolutionary Architectures

The greatest risk with design patterns is over-application. Not every problem can be solved cleanly with an existing design pattern; don’t try to force a problem into a design pattern when a custom approach will be cleaner.

— John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design

…proximity to hardware gives software a bad rap, like an extremely attractive friend who makes you feel inadequate: “The anomaly is not that software progress is so slow but that computer hardware progress is so fast. No other technology since civilization began has seen six orders of magnitude price-performance gain in 30 years”.

— Adam Barr, The Problem With Software

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

— Francis Bacon, Of Innovations

Thus I dispelled the diseased notion of selflessness, observing introspectively that the reasons behind all my actions, even those done for other people, were invariably rooted in my own self, and that it was psychologically impossible for it to be otherwise. And because these same psychological factors that existed in me also existed in all other people (as well as animals), I could see that absolutely all actions were at their core selfish, and that this universally accepted and commonly used concept of selflessness (as the opposite of, and mutually exclusive from, selfishness) simply didn’t exist in reality.

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

…gathering is about connection, but it’s also about power, pretending power dynamics don’t exist will make you a less artful gatherer.

— Priya Parker, The Art of the Gathering

A second line of research has shown that economic stress robs us of cognitive bandwidth. Worrying about bills, food or other problems, leaves less capacity to think ahead or to exert self-discipline. So, poverty imposes a mental tax.

— Martin Meadows, 365 Days With Self-Discipline

…it is this capacity to injure the person above you that makes empowerment work.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

As soon as some of our young ladies cut their hair, put on blue spectacles, and called themselves nihilists, they became convinced at once that, having put on the spectacles, they immediately began to have their own “convictions.” As soon as a man feels in his heart just a drop of some sort of generally human and kindly feeling for something or other, he immediately becomes convinced that no one else feels as he does, that he is in the forefront of general development. As soon as a man takes some thought or other at its word or reads a little page of something without beginning or end, he believes at once that these are “his own thoughts” and were conceived in his own brain. The impudence of naïvety, if one may put it so, goes so far in such cases as to be astonishing; all this is incredible, but one meets with it constantly.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

He who has known the other days, the angry ones of gout attacks, or those with that wicked headache rooted behind the eyeballs that casts a spell on every nerve of eye and ear with a fiendish delight in torture, or soul-destroying, evil days of inward vacancy and despair, when, on this distracted earth, sucked dry by the vampires of finance, the world of men and of so-called culture grins back at us with the lying, vulgar, brazen glamor of a Fair and dogs us with the persistence of an emetic, and when all is concentrated and focused to the last pitch of the intolerable upon your own sick self—he who has known these days of hell may be content indeed with normal half-and-half days like today.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Thus in social media-driven politics, we find ourselves at the surfaces of things, feeding on apparent victories, enraged by apparent setbacks, ignorant of the real-world impact of what we are perceiving. But even when it is working as it should, politics is a competition more than it is a shared endeavor.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

Just don’t lie to yourself by conflating emoting about a problem and dealing with it. Because they are as different as sleeping and waking.

— Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way

It is plausible, if not inevitable, that we are more aware of the pain we suffer at the hands of others than of the pain that others suffer by our hands.

— Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes

Zen is like a man hanging in a tree by his teeth over a precipice. His hands grasp no branch, his feet rest on no limb, and under the tree another person asks him: “Why did Bodhidharma come to China from India?” if the man in the tree does not answer, he fails; and if he does answer, he falls and loses his life. Now what shall he do?

— The Mind’s I, Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

…schools often do not allow children to be creative and exporative, but demand rote learning and discipline. All these things actively destroy curiosity in HG children. … It is not surprising to me that ADHD rates are soaring under such conditions.

— Andreas Hofer and Adrienn Raczi, Born Different

just as the blowing winds preserve the sea from stagnation, so also stagnation in peoples would be the product of prolonged, let alone absolute peace

— Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Except for a few natural catastrophes, every great woe has been driven by a stupidity.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

…it is never a person’s toolset that constrains their potential, it’s their mindset.

— Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain

if a man is born in whom nature is strong enough, he’ll shake off all his limitations, shatter them to pieces, and win his freedom

— Plato, Gorgias

Working with systems, on the computer, in nature, among people, in organizations, constantly reminds me of how incomplete my mental models are, how complex the world is, and how much I don’t know.

— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

Heisenberg stressed that the laws of nature are no longer dealt with elementary particles, but with our knowledge of these particles – that is, with the contents of our minds.

— Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I

Fetishizing the novelty of the problem (or at least its “framing”) deprives the public of the analytic tools it has previously brought to bear on similar problems.

— Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking

The job of QA is not to find all the bugs; that’s the programmers’ job. The job of QA is to specify the system behavior in terms of tests with sufficient detail that defects are excluded from the final system.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Craftsmanship

When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

If there is no best design solution, then that Extreme Programming simple solution is likely to be as successful as any other…

— Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

Restraint is so much easier to practice in the special-purpose design.

— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design

Facts don’t cause stress. Drama and stress are caused by stories, and stories are made up.

— Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

…the cognitive psychologist marshals experimental evidence, models, and theories to show that people are engaged in surprisingly sophisticated reasoning processes of which they can give no introspective account at all. Not only are minds accessible to outsiders, some mental activities are more accessible to outsiders than to the very “owners” of those minds.

— Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I

Often, the journey to greatness begins the moment our preferences for comfort and certainty are overruled by a greater purpose that requires challenge and contribution.

— Brendon Burchard, High Performance Habits

Of all men, those alone are at leisure who take time for wisdom, they alone live; for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex every age to their own; all the years that have gone before them are an addition to their store. Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life. By other men’s labors we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into the light; from no age are we shut out, we are admitted to all ages, and if it is our wish, by greatness of soul, to pass beyond the narrow limits of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam. We may argue with Socrates, we may doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics. Since the nature of things allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters?

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On The Shortness Of Life

No matter how many digits we add to our age, we will always be confined to who we are. If death did undercut the meaning of life, this would imply that no one has ever lived a meaningful life.

— Anja Publications, Philosophy Now

Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths… States are rooted in common national myths… Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths… Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

— Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

Here there is no doubt that timidity and a total lack of personal initiative have always been regarded among us as the chiefest and best sign of the practical man—and are so regarded even now. But why blame only ourselves—if this opinion can be considered an accusation? Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the best recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man, and at least ninety-nine out of a hundred people (at least that) have always held to that notion, and only perhaps one out of a hundred people has constantly looked and still looks at it differently.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

…hope is the greatest of misfortunes. For it is by nature an absence, a lack, a source of tension in our lives.

— Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought

Darwin accurately realized that if you hold the belief that everyone else is wrong, you’re in trouble.

— Peter Hollins, Mental Models

A man of true science uses but few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose; whereas the smatterer in science thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.

— Herman Melville, White Jacket

Life is a process, not a substance, and it is necessarily temporary. We are not the reason for the existence of the universe, but our ability for self-awareness and reflection makes us special within it.

— Sean Carroll, The Big Picture

…you can’t defend yourself against this court, all you can do is confess. Confess the first chance you get. That’s the only chance you have to escape, the only one. However, even that is impossible without help from others…

— Franz Kafka, The Trial

I’ve seen people severely messed up by their own knowledge of biases. They have more ammunition with which to argue against anything they don’t like. And that problem—too much ready ammunition—is one of the primary ways that people with high mental agility end up stupid…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

Innate mechanisms are important not because everything is innate and learning is unimportant, but because the only way to explain learning is to identify the innate mechanisms that make learning possible.

— Steven Pinker, Language, Cognition, and Human Nature

You can’t protect yourself against your own people’s incompetence.

— Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, Peopleware

The news, far from being a “first draft of history,” is closer to play-by-play sports commentary.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

The prevailing feeling is that too many opportunities are opening too quickly and that our ability to modify genes is outpacing our capacity for making wise and farsighted use of the skill.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

But he knows that his freedom from company clocks doesn’t stem from corporate altruism. “They don’t want us to know how many hours we work. If we did, they’d have to pay us a lot more….

— Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

It is easy to become captive to words, to treat them as though they truly and fully convey genuine knowledge—as though they are real cash money, legal tender, accepted everywhere at their face value, rather than mere counters.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

Superior tools only prolong the life of inferior languages.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

Left to their own devices, software engineers will proliferate tools, ignoring feature overlaps for the sake of that one thing tool X does better than tool Y that is relevant only in that specific situation.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

Starting with “What will offend no one?” may avoid taking sides but rarely leads to the truth.

— Ali Almossawi and Alejandro Giraldo, An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language

Complex applications combine different types of problems, so picking the right language for each job may be more productive than trying to fit all aspects into a single language.

— Pramod J. Sadalage and Martin Fowler, NoSQL Distilled

The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call failings when we are at our most frightened).

— Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, On Kindness

…theological weakness of Pascal’s wager, which stipulates that believing in the creator has a positive payoff in case he truly exists, and no downside in case he doesn’t. Hence the wager would be to believe in God as a free option. But there are no free options. If you follow the idea to its logical end, you can see that it proposes religion without skin in the game, making it a purely academic and sterile activity. But what applies to Jesus should also apply to other believers. We will see that, traditionally, there is no religion without some skin in the game.

— Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The fact that academics tell us that good process is the best way to good product should be seen as what it is: the natural tendency of a non-goal-oriented group to focus on things of interest to themselves, not necessarily of usefulness to their more goal-focused colleagues.

— Robert L. Glass and Tom DeMarco, Software Creativity 2.0

Is he a dread genetic determinist, or a dread environmental determinist? He is neither, of course, for both these species of bogeyman are as mythical as werewolves. By increasing the information we have about the various causes of the constraints that limit our current opportunities, he has increased our powers to avoid what we want to avoid, prevent what we want to prevent. Knowledge of the roles of our genes, and the genes of the other species around us, is not the enemy of human freedom, but one of its best friends.

— Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves

…textbooks present lots of facts and techniques. But they do not enable anyone to become a scientist. You are inducted not by the laws and the theories but by the problems at the ends of the chapters.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

There is a particular obsession with localization, as if knowing where something is in the brain is the key to explaining it.

— Paul Bloom, Against Empathy

Proclamations of officialness didn’t further the Net nearly so much as throwing technology out onto the Net to see what worked. And when something worked, it was adopted.

— Matthew Lyon and Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late

“You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here,” Kelly often told new Bell Labs employees in his speech to them on their first day, “but you get your raises and promotions on what you do in the other sixteen and a half hours.”

— Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory