…once you’ve decided to go with a given group, your best tactic is to trust them. Any defensive measure taken to guarantee success in spite of them will only make things worse.

— Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, Peopleware

What the theory of natural selection says, rather, is that people’s minds were designed to maximize fitness in the environment in which those minds evolved.

— Robert Wright, The Moral Animal

I believe the issue is even deeper than social status. I don’t know how Peopleware became a best seller. I never run into any managers who have read it. Beyond that, I hardly run into any managers who read about their industry, management theory, or psychology, period. I used to believe that they were overloaded with information regarding the specifics of their job, but frankly, managers still aren’t trained, or do not educate themselves, to do their jobs. As for social status, IT managers have been status deprived in their organizations since they were developers, so status is even more important to them than their peers in other lines of business. I am amazed at some of the corner office kingdoms that CIO’s create for themselves.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

If Stalin is evil, then everything he says should be false. You wouldn’t want to agree with Stalin, would you? Stalin also believed that 2 + 2 = 4. Yet if you defend any statement made by Stalin, even “2 + 2 = 4,” people will see only that you are “agreeing with Stalin”; you must be on his side.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

We should only let ourselves identify with causes and groups that are actually, y’know, good in a non-comparative sense—never with the mere lesser of two evils.

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