Two sages were standing on a bridge over a stream. One said to the other, “I wish I were a fish. They are so happy!” The second replied, “How do you know whether fish are happy or not?” You’re not a fish.” The first said, “But you’re not me, so how do you know whether I know how fish feel?”

— Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I

The natural enemies of this spirit are cleverness and specialisation: hence the contempt so rightly shown for, in the Roman world, experts and technicians – the Graeculus esuriens – the remote but unmistakable ancestors of the sharp, wizened figures of the modern Alexandrian Age – the terrible Eighteenth Century – all the avocasserie and écrivasserie, the miserable crew of attorneys and scribblers, with the predatory, sordid, grinning figure of Voltaire at their head, destructive and self-destructive, because blind and deaf to the true word of God.

— Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff, The Hedgehog and the Fox

He means the same thing Kelly Johnson did: if something is ugly, it can’t be the best solution. There must be a better one, and eventually someone else will discover it.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

If just one or two engineers are getting something wrong, adding to everyone’s mental load by creating new rules doesn’t scale.

— Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright, Software Engineering at Google

Many of the dramas of human social life—the sagas of sympathy, trust, favor, debt, revenge, gratitude, guilt, shame, treachery, gossip, reputation—may be understood as the playing of strategies in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality