What makes me a libertarian is that the prospect of having that reconfiguration done by the same system that managed to ban marijuana while allowing tobacco, subsidize ethanol made from corn, and turn the patent system into a form of legalized bludgeoning, makes me want to run screaming into the night until I fall over from lack of oxygen.

— Michael Shermer, Joe Carter, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Ronald Bailey, and Jason Kuznicki, Brain, Belief, and Politics

Much of discussion circled around Schwartz’s assertion that the most durable and influential of human artifacts are IDEAS. And a distinction worth drawing is between POWERFUL ideas and GOOD ideas. Not all powerful ideas turn out to be good, in the long run. For example, Schwartz proposed that monotheism has been an extremely powerful idea, dominating all kinds of human activity for millennia, but its overall goodness is increasingly questionable.

— Stewart Brand, SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-Term Thinking

This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus

…people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

…it is an empirical fact that local search algorithms are the top performers on a broad range of optimization problems.

— Sanjoy Dasgupta, Christos Papadimitriou, and Umesh Vazirani, Algorithms