My lifetime motto is that mathematicians think in (well, precisely defined and mapped) objects and relations, jurists and legal thinkers in constructs, logicians in maximally abstract operators, and…fools in words.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

I encounter people who very definitely believe in evolution, who sneer at the folly of creationists. And yet they have no idea of what the theory of evolutionary biology permits and prohibits.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Map and Territory

The romantic Green movement sees the human capture of energy not as a way of resisting entropy and enhancing human flourishing but as a heinous crime against nature, which will exact a dreadful justice in the form of resource wars, poisoned air and water, and civilization-ending climate change. Our only salvation is to repent, repudiate technology and economic growth, and revert to a simpler and more natural way of life.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

The process of learning a culture—enculturation—is partly explicit but mostly implicit. The explicit part can be put into books and taught in seminars or classrooms. Most of culture is acquired by a process of absorption—by living and practicing the culture with those who already share it. No book, including this one, can replace the need to live a culture. But it is possible to use a book as a means of “sensitizing,” of preparing, a person for enculturation—shortening the time required to understand and begin integrating lived experiences.

— David West, Object Thinking

If science is based on “faith,” then science is of the same kind as religion—directly comparable. If science is a religion, it is the religion that heals the sick and reveals the secrets of the stars. It would make sense to say, “The priests of science can blatantly, publicly, verifiably walk on the Moon as a faith-based miracle, and your priests’ faith can’t do the same.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind