If someone starts out by asking whether or not AIs are gonna put us into capsules like in The Matrix, they’re jumping to a 100-bit proposition, without a corresponding 98 bits of evidence to locate it in the answer space as a possibility worthy of explicit consideration.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

Knuth has stated that he feels that at the beginning of the 1970s, academics were good programmers and industry professionals were not. Yet during that decade, as the scope of software that industry wrote increased, the situation reversed itself, and by the end of the decade the academics had drifted out of sync with what was going on in industry and restricted their programming, and therefore their area of expertise, to smaller programs that were no longer useful for generating advice for industry.

— Adam Barr, The Problem With Software

Reasoning that doesn’t rest until we can find a secure foundation for some belief might be thrilling to philosophers, but it is anguishing, and, frankly, feels unnecessary for the rest of us most of the time.

— Kevin Currie-Knight, Humans, the Believing Animals

Philosophy and science are only able to function in effect by opposing ‘the intelligible world’ to the ‘physical world’ in such a manner that the second is always devalued in relation to the first.

— Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought

…perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining…

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground