Quote of the Day
If you enjoy programming, philosophy, math, or any number of geeky topics, you're in the right place. Every day, I'll post a random quote from my extensive collection of Kindle highlights. Quotes do not necessarily reflect my views or opinions. In fact, part of my epistemic process is to consume a wide variety of contradictory material.
10/10/2022
One obvious injury done by accepting the Rational Model is that we mis-educate our successors. We teach them modes of working that we ourselves do not follow.
— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design
Background Information: Rational Model
10/09/2022
If you start dedicating even a couple of hours a week to developing the team around you, it’s quite likely that will become your legacy long after your tech specs and pull requests are forgotten.
— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer
10/08/2022
Philosophy is on a higher plane than art or religion, which are still tied to “picture-thinking”.
— Lloyd Spencer, Introducing Hegel
10/07/2022
one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers. If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there’d be no need for a special theory of relativity: it’d be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster time elapses in the rest of the world. If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there’d be no theory of evolution, and certainly no creationism: we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes, instead of painstakingly reconstructing events from fossils and DNA. If we could bake bread at 20,000,000 degrees Kelvin, nuclear fusion would be not the esoteric domain of physicists but ordinary household knowledge. But we can’t do any of these things, and so we have science, to deduce about the gargantuan what we, with our infinitesimal faculties, will never sense. If people fear big numbers, is it any wonder that they fear science as well and turn for solace to the comforting smallness of mysticism?
— Scott Aaronson, Who Can Name the Bigger Number?
10/06/2022
the instruction must not be given the aspect of a compulsion to learn… don’t use force in training the children in the subjects, but rather play. In that way you can better discern what each is naturally directed toward.
— Plato and Desmond Lee, Republic
1782 post articles, 357 pages.