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