In English we don’t use the word ‘swim’ to describe what a submarine does; but Japanese does use the same word for the movement of humans and submarines through water. That doesn’t tell us anything about oceanography or ship design – just as thought experiments about ‘understanding’ in everyday language use don’t tell us anything useful about cognitive science.

— Michael DeBellis, Arguing With the Chinese Room

High IQ without that aspect of creativity and big-picture thinking does not make a person gifted.

— Andreas Hofer and Adrienn Raczi, Born Different

…we constantly see teams that have chosen the shiniest new architectural pattern rather than the most appropriate one suffer. Part of choosing an architecture lies in understanding where the problem and physical architecture come together.

— Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, and Patrick Kua, Building Evolutionary Architectures

If you argue that God, to test humanity’s faith, refuses to reveal His existence, then the miracles described in the Bible must argue against the existence of God.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Map and Territory

…when we have very little or no experience with an activity (perhaps only book-knowledge). Then we are prone to represent it completely fictitiously, with very little correlation to reality, and often with a lot of anxiety besides.

— Roman Gelperin, Addiction, Procrastination, and Laziness