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.
05/21/2022
The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding…
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game
05/20/2022
That Douglass and King could approvingly quote Jefferson, himself a hypocritical and in some ways dishonorable man, does not compromise the rationality of their arguments but reinforces it. We should care about people’s virtue when considering them as friends, but not when considering the ideas they voice. Ideas are true or false, consistent or contradictory, conducive to human welfare or not, regardless of who thinks them.
— Steven Pinker, Rationality
05/19/2022
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken. OLIVER CROMWELL [1650]
— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design
05/18/2022
A major breakthrough of the Scientific Revolution—perhaps its biggest breakthrough—was to refute the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose.
— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now
05/17/2022
Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.
— Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct
1725 post articles, 345 pages.