"We take almost all of the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious."
-- Austerlitz
"In both poker and life, you can't read people any better than they can read themselves. You can, if you’re good, very accurately determine if they think their hand is good, or if they think they know the answer to your legal question. But you can't be sure if reality differs from their perception."
-- Matt Maroon
"We should not complain about impermanence, because without impermanence, nothing is possible."
-- Thich Nhat Hanh
"I've never been happy. I have a few memories, early in life, and it sounds dramatic to say, but when I reflect on my life, the best I've ever had were brief periods when things were simply less painful."
-- [Anonymous]
Q: What are the "intuitive and metaphyscal arts"?
A: The gods alone know. Probably the old tired con-acts of fortune-telling and putting the hex on your neighbor's goat, glossed up with gibberish borrowed from pop science tracts in the last two centuries.
-- The Aleph Anti-FAQ
"If you build a snazzy alife sim ... you'd be a kind of bridging `first cause', and might even have the power to intervene in their lives - even obliterate their entire experienced cosmos - but that wouldn't make you a god in any interesting sense. Gods are ontologically distinct from creatures, or they're not worth the paper they're written on."
-- Damien Broderick
"NORMAL is a setting on a washing-machine."
-- Nikolai Kingsley
Do you think the Matt Maroon quote is correct? I'm not even quite sure what he's trying to say, because he equivocates between denying that you can accurately read the world through the lens of other people's behavior or affect (you can't know if their poker hand is actually good), and denying that you can accurately read other people's minds through the lens of their behavior or affect (you can't know if they actually know the answer to your legal question). Or maybe both?
Anyway, I'm not even sure how accurately you can tell if they think their hand is good. But putting that aside, surely there are some things you can learn about people -- and even, by implication, about the external world -- from their behavior, even when they themselves do not know (do not "perceive") these things?