Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.

-- Paul Graham

The world of the manager is one of problems and opportunities. Problems are to be managed; one must understand the nature of the problem, amass resources adequate to deal with it, and "work the problem" on an ongoing basis.[...] But what if the problem can be fixed? This is not the domain of the manager.

An engineer believes most problems have solutions. The engineer isn't interested in building an organisation to cope with the problem. [...] And yet the engineer's faith in fixes often blinds him to the fact that many problems, especially those involving people, don't have the kind of complete permanent solutions he seeks.

-- John Walker, The Hacker's Diet (~loc 250 on an e-reader)

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

-- George Bernard Shaw

...these things are possible. And because they're possible we have to think of them so they don't surprise us later. We have to think of them so that if the worst does come, we'll already know how to live in that universe.

-- Miro, in Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

You know something is important when you're willing to let someone else take the credit if that's what it takes to get it done.

-Seth Godin

"If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't."

― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

On the presentation of science in the news:

It's not that clean energy will never happen -- it totally will. It's just that it won't come from a wild-haired scientist running out of his basement screaming, "Eureka! I've discovered how to get limitless clean energy from common seawater!" Instead, it will come from thousands of scientists publishing unreadable studies with titles like "Assessing Effectiveness and Costs of Asymmetrical Methods of Beryllium Containment in Gen 4 Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors When Factoring for Cromulence Decay." The world will be saved by a series of boring, incremental advances that chip away at those technical challenges one tedious step at a time.

But nobody wants to read about that in their morning Web browsing. We want to read that while we were sleeping, some unlikely hero saved the world. Or at least cured cancer.

David Wong — 5 Easy Ways to Spot a BS News Story on the Internet

The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.

--George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

Luck, when it's regular, it's called skill. (Il culo, quando è sistematico, si chiama classe)

Nereo Rocco

(I tried a rough tranlsation, but it sounds way better in Italian)

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

-- Thomas Sowell

"Luck" is useless as a strategy and "Hard work" is mostly useless. Prefer "Discover rules then systematically exploit them."

- patio11

"I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd-Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician and a solipsist, her surprise surprised me.”

Bertrand Russell

Shouldn't "it works like a charm" be said about things that don't work?

Jason Roy

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak, and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.

John Adams, US President

Related

Hasn't common sense been wrong before? Of course. But how do people show that a common sense view is wrong? By demonstrating a conflict with other views even more firmly grounded in common sense. The strongest scientific evidence can always be rejected if you're willing to say, "Our senses deceive us" or "Memory is never reliable" or "All the scientists have conspired to trick us." The only problem with these foolproof intellectual defenses is... that... they're... absurd.

--Bryan Caplan

On consciousness:

"Forget about minds," he told her. "Say you've got a device designed to monitor—oh, cosmic rays, say. What happens when you turn its sensor around so it's not pointing at the sky anymore, but at its own guts?"

He answered himself before she could: "It does what it's built to. It measures cosmic rays, even though it's not looking at them any more. It parses its own circuitry in terms of cosmic-ray metaphors, because those feel right, because they feel natural, because it can't look at things any other way. But it's the wrong metaphor. So the system misunderstands everything about itself. Maybe that's not a grand and glorious evolutionary leap after all. Maybe it's just a design flaw."

-- Blindsight, by Peter Watts

I remember asking a wise man, once,

'Why do men fear the dark?'

'Because darkness' he told me, 'is ignorance made visible.'

'And do men despise ignorance?', I asked.

'No!', he said, 'they prize it above all things - all things! - but only so long as it remains invisible.'

– R. Scott Bakker: The Judging Eye

That's something that I think laypeople never realize about computer science - it's all really simple things, but combined together at such a scale and pace that in a few decades we've done the equivalent of building a cat from scratch out of DNA. Big complex things really can be built out of extremely simple parts, and we're doing it all the time, but for a lot of people our technology is indistinguishable from magic.

-- wtallis

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen"--which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.

--Frank Herbert, Dune

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

--Ursula K. Le Guin {Lord Estraven}, The Left Hand of Darkness

I... believe the experimentalists when they say the world works in a completely different way than I thought it did... All I want to know is: What went wrong with my intuition? How should I fix it, to put it more in line with what the experiments found? How could I have reasoned, such that the actual behavior of the world wouldn't have surprised me so much?

Scott Aaronson

Any positive social quality -- looks, smarts, cash, power, whatever -- makes people want to compete for your attention. Some of these people are going to be assholes operating under the mistaken impression that you are a vending machine, and that if they feed you enough suck-up coins, you will dispense whatever it is they want. If you have no idea that you have Quality X that they want from you, then you have no chance of figuring out that the reason they're getting so overbearing is that you're not giving them all the X they think they deserve. People can get remarkably angry when you don't give them the thing you have no idea they're asking for. And then they get angrier if you try to tell them you're confused.

Arabella Flynn

Wenn der Hahn kräht auf dem Mist, dann ändert sich das Wetter, oder es bleibt wie es ist.

(When the rooster crows on the dungheap, then the weather will change, or stay as it is)

-- German weather lore / farmers' rule

You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works – it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.

-- Freeman Dyson

“Anything left on your bucket list?”

“Not dying...”

-Bill Gates in his AMA on reddit.

If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking can undo it.

-Dawkins Into to the 30th anniversary edition of the Selfish Gene.

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

W. H. Auden

There’s a funny irony in “tell your story” and “speak your truth”, in that those two things are fundamentally at odds with each other. Stories and narratives aren’t, and can’t be, the truth of our actual lived experiences. Real lives don’t follow the structures of narrative, they don’t move in linear tidy sequences of causes and actions and effects and consequences. Real lives are big jumbled messes that are almost impossible to make real sense of, and the act of imposing a narrative on them, sorting out our “life story”, is always an act of editing.

-Natalie Reed

Something a friend said that made sense in context that really cracked me up:

"I'm decidedly aware of unknown unknowns."

Some people are moved to "change the world" by compassion; some people look for beauty. I'm just confused, and I want to get clear.

celandine13

Let us, then, avoid the philosophical minefields of belief and truth, and pay attention to what we really need, which is predictive ability.

From a great book

If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel § 413; via "Fable of The Born-Blind-People"

(Gb rkcerff guvf va zber YJl wnetba: vs lbh qvq abg nyernql xabj gur jbeq be pbaprcg snvel, jung bofreingvbaf jbhyq cevivyrtr gur fcrpvsvp ulcbgurfvf bs 'snvevrf' gb gur cbvag jurer vg jbhyq orpbzr n frevbhf cbffvovyvgl? Ubj znal ovgf jbhyq gung gnxr naq jurer jbhyq lbh trg gurz, nfvqr sebz gur zrqvn naq bgure crbcyr'f cebqhpgf?)

"I wish to defend this world. I wish to protect this world which God has abandoned, and defend it against everything that threatens it!"

-- To the Stars (Madoka fanfiction)

I'm sorry, I want to be with someone more interesting, someone who just does something wild and lets the chips fall where they may!

I plan to never take any action toward fulfilling any of my hopes and dreams. What could possibly be riskier than that?

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

I once had a civil argument with [someone], in which I laid out my position in the usual way: “Premiss + premiss + premiss = conclusion.” She responded: “Well, that’s your opinion; you have yours, and I have mine.” I pointed out that no, I wasn’t asserting an opinion, I was making an argument based on facts and logic. Either my facts are wrong, or my logic is. She looked at me like I had lost my mind.

--Rod Dreher

(Post slightly edited in response to comments below)

Popular evopsych, summed up: "Men and women are different. Humans and chimps are the same."

Cliff Pervocracy

"Where'd they go?" said Wensley.

WHERE THEY BELONG, said Death, still holding Adam's gaze. WHERE THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN. BACK IN THE MINDS OF MAN.

He grinned at Adam.

There was a tearing sound. Death's robe split and his wings unfolded. Angel's wings. But not of feathers. They were wings of night, wings that were shapes cut through the matter of creation into the darkness underneath, in which a few distant lights glimmered, lights that may have been stars or may have been something entirely else.

BUT I, he said, AM NOT LIKE THEM. I AM AZRAEL, CREATED TO BE CREATION'S SHADOW. YOU CANNOT DESTROY ME. THAT WOULD DESTROY THE WORLD.

The heat of their stare faded. Adam scratched his nose.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “There might be a way.” He grinned back.

• Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

In every transaction with an airline there are two customers. The first is the one who buys the ticket. He wants the best deal and is willing to go to another web site to save ten bucks. The second is the customer who shows up and acts as if he bought first class.

-- David Henderson quoting a flight attendant

"You are technically correct—the best kind of correct."

-Futurama

Don't solve the solved problems.

Arman Suleimenov

"You can accept, reject, or examine and test any new idea that comes to you. The wise man chooses the third way." - Tom Willhite

Rule number one of life: Don't get mad at video games. Corollary to rule number one: Life is a video game.

-Matt Vana

Trusting choices made by the same brain that turns my hot 9th grade teacher into a knife-bearing possum at the last second every damn night.

Sean Thomason

The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people.

Randy Pausch in The Last Lecture.

Surely a man who possesses even a little erectioris ingenii [of the higher way of thinking] has not become entirely a cold and clammy mollusk, and when he approaches what is great it can never escape his mind that from the creation of the world it has been customary for the result to come last, and that, if one would truly learn anything from great actions, one must pay attention precisely to the beginning. In case he who should act were to judge himself according to the result, he would never get to the point of beginning. Even though the result may give joy to the whole world, it cannot help the hero, for he would get to know the result only when the whole thing was over, and it was not by this he became a hero, but he was such for the fact that he began.

--Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

"The 'law of causality' is obsolete and misleading. The principle 'same cause, same effect' is utterly otiose. As soon as the antecedents have been given sufficiently fully to enable the consequent to be calculated with some exactitude, the antecedents have become so complicated that it is very unlikely they will ever recur." - Bertrand Russell "On the Notion of Cause", 1913

Within five minutes of the Singularity appearing, someone will suggest defragging it.

• Randall Monroe, xkcd 1180.

In an article proclaiming the transcendent use of complicated, modern statistics in baseball, and in particular, one called "WAR" (wins above replacement):

I'm not a mathematician and I'm not a scientist. I'm a guy who tries to understand baseball with common sense. In this era, that means embracing advanced metrics that I don't really understand. That should make me a little uncomfortable, and it does. WAR is a crisscrossed mess of routes leading toward something that, basically, I have to take on faith.

And faith is irrational and anti-intellectual, right? Faith is for rain dances and sun gods, for spirituality but not science. Actually, no. Faith is how we organize a complicated modern world. Faith is what you have when your doctor walks in with a syringe filled with something that could be anything and tells you that it'll keep you from getting the measles. Unless you're a doctor or a medical scientist, you don't really understand vaccines, and you certainly can't brew one up at home. You have outsourced the intellectual side of your health to people who, your faith reassures you, are smarter than you. Maybe in one way of looking at it you're not as smart as your great-great-great-grandparents were, because they had to take responsibility for cooking their own medicine. But you'll live longer. The complicated nature of WAR, your inability to touch the guts of it, isn't an argument against it. That's just what human advancement looks like in the 21st century. And if you can accept that you can walk into a tube built out of 100 tons of aluminum, fly seven miles off the ground and land safely thousands of miles away, you can accept WAR.