…the Internet handled a great problem of space – it allowed us to communicate with anybody in the world, instantly. However, it did not make us better communicators. In fact, it took many poor communicators and gave them a massive platform on which they could spread hatred and fear.

— Max Kanat-Alexander, Understanding Software

Since no one can know everything, and most people know almost nothing, rationality consists of outsourcing knowledge to institutions that specialize in creating and sharing it, primarily academia, public and private research units, and the press.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

Thoughtlessness is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today’s world. For nowadays we take in everything in the quickest and cheapest way, only to forget it just as quickly.

— Martin Heidegger, Discourse on thinking

In 2018 Henry Kissinger warned that since deep learning systems don’t work on propositions we can examine and justify, they portend the end of the Enlightenment.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

Everybody is by their nature always acting in their own best interest; and it’s only the erratic fluctuations of their human minds and the misleading beliefs they acquire in the course of their lives that lead them to their failures and unvirtuous actions. Thus, no person has any reason to feel shame, guilt, or reproach for anything he ever did, because at the time he always had a perfectly valid and justifiable reason for doing it.

— Roman Gelperin, The Master Mind of the Self-Actualizing Person