Show subjects a picture of an object embedded in a complex background. Within seconds, people from collectivist cultures (e.g., China) tend to look more at, and remember better, the surrounding “contextual” information, while people from individualistic cultures (e.g., the United States) do the same with the focal object.

— Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave

…functional programming is quite popular within the research community but I think a lot of people outside that community see functional programming as being driven by ideas that, while neat, can be very mathematical and divorced from day-to-day programming.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

…abstractions make the world manageable: simpler problem statements - free of reality - are much more analytically tractable and provided that we did not ignore anything essential, the solutions are widely applicable.

— Mikito Takada, Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit

One of the greatest urges of the newly minted manager is to actively “manage” their employees because that’s what a manager does, right? This typically has disastrous consequences.

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

Whether a choice driven by these emotions is “rational” depends on whether you think that emotions are natural responses we should respect, like eating and staying warm, or evolutionary nuisances our rational powers should override.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality