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