[quotes] The Knowledge Illusion - Steven Sloman and Phillip Fernbach 2017

"Our intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind."

"We all suffer, from a greater or lesser extent, from an illusion of understanding, an illusion that we understand how things work when in fact our understanding is meager."

"Our skulls may delimit the frontiers of our brains, but they do not delimit the frontier of our knowledge."

"Looking closer at things just raises more questions. There is always more to understand."

"... It's about what causes people to act and how you can modify their motivations, to make them think they're doing something for a different reason than they initially thought."

"When a community agrees to buy into a particular story, they are accepting the attitude implied by the story."

"My ability to act doesn't depend on the knowledge that happens to be in my head at a given moment; it depends on what knowledge I can access when I need it."

"The curse of knowledge is that we tend to think what is in our heads is in the heads of others. In the knowledge illusion, we tend to think what is in others' heads is in our heads. In both cases, we fail to discern who knows what."

"Each of us has our little window on the world, a little bit of knowledge that we have access to."

"We may individually suffer from the knowledge illusion, but the expertise that's present in a crowd can overcome individual biases."

"The power that culture has over cognition just swamps these attempts at education."

"Apparently, the fact that a strong majority of people has some preference does not mean that their opinion is informed."

"... great philosopher and political activist Bertrand Russell said, 'The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists.'"

"Getting people to think beyond their own interests and experiences may be necessary for reducing their hubris and thereby reducing polarization."

"... thinking through the consequences of a policy is hard - very hard. It's much easier just to hide one's ignorance in a veil of platitudes about sacred values."

"... people are less inclined to seek new information after finding out they were wrong. Causal explanation is an effective way to shatter the illusion, but people don't like having their illusion shattered."

"A good leader must be able to help people realize their ignorance without making them feel stupid."

"The idolization of individuals, as well as our corresponding failure to appreciate the role of the communities they represent, is more than just a ruse to simplify complex histories. The images we retain of these individuals shape how we think about the events they participated in."

"Understanding where you fit requires understanding not only what you know but also what others know that you don't."

"In every domain of life, knowledge is interdependent. The knowledge that I'm legally responsible for is not necessarily in my head."

"Learning and performance benefit from having a greater range of expertise. Having a diverse group of people of different backgrounds, classes, genders, and races can only increase that range."

"The big lesson of the nudge approach is that it is easier and more effective to change the environment than it is to change the person."

[quotes] Pachinko - Min Jin Lee 2017

 

"If it were possible for a man and his wife to share one heart, Hoonie was this steady, beating organ."

"Most people told you their thoughts in words and later confirmed them in actions. There were more people who told the truth than those who lied. Very few people lied well. What was most disappointing to him was when a person turned out to be no different than the next."

"'Most people are rotten everywhere you go. They're no good. You want to see a bad man?  Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let's see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.'"

"He had become almost inured to death; his frailty had reinforced his conviction that he must do something of consequence while he had the time."

"'One bad Korean ruins it for thousands of others. And one bad Christian hurts tens of thousands of Christians everywhere, especially in a nation of unbelievers.'"

"Yoseb would have crawled on his belly across the floor of the station if that would have made Isak free. Their eldest brother, Samoel, had been the brave one, the one who would've confronted the officers with audacity and grace, but Yoseb knew he was no hero [...] Yoseb didn't understand the point of anyone dying for his country or for some greater ideal. He understood survival and family."

"Save your family. Feed your belly. Pay attention, and be skeptical of the people in charge."

"Without the others around, it was possible to be kind to her son. Parents weren't supposed to praise their children, she knew this - it would only invite disaster."

"The factory owner believed that if all Asian countries were run with a kind of Japanese efficiency, attention to detail, and high level of organization, Asia as a whole would prosper and rise - able to defeat the unscrupulous West."

"Patriotism is just an idea, so is capitalism or communism. But ideas can make men forget their own interests. And the guys in charge will exploit men who believe in ideas too much."

"'Although, if you like everything you read, I can't take you seriously. Perhaps you didn't think about these books long enough.'"

"she would not believe that she was no different than her parents, that seeing him as only Korean - good or bad - was the same as seeing him only as a bad Korean. She would not see his humanity, and Noa realized that this was what he wanted most of all: to be seen as human."

"He would not understand. Her son could not feel compassion for those who did not try."

"the players also came to escape the eerily quiet streets where few said hello, to keep away from the loveless homes where wives slept with children instead of husbands, and to avoid the overheated rush-hour train cars where it was okay to push but not okay to talk to strangers."

"'People are awful. Drink some beer'"

"Etsuko Nagatomi loved all three of her children, but she did not love them all the same. Being a mother had taught her that this kind of emotional injustice was perhaps inevitable."

"her ex-husband used to dismiss this idea of fate as a lazy explanation for the bad choices people made. Regardless, life had only confirmed her belief that there was indeed a pattern to it all."

"There were so many errors. If life allowed revisions, she would let them stay in their baths a little longer, read them one more story before bed, and fix them another plate of shrimp."

"'I have never been to Japan [...] but I hope that wherever I am in life and whatever I do, I can be a good Japanese. I hope to never bring shame to my people.'"

"The Japanese said that Koreans had too much heat in their blood. Seeds, blood. How could you fight such hopeless ideas? Noa had been a sensitive child who had believed that if he followed all the rules and was the best, then somehow the hostile world would change its mind. His death may have been her fault for having allowed him to believe in such cruel ideas."

"'So then success tax comes from envy, and the shit tax comes from exploitation. Okay [...] then what's the mediocre tax?' [...] 'Good question, young Jedi. The tax for being mediocre comes from you and everyone else knowing that you are mediocre. It's a heavier tax than you'd think.'"

[quotes] The Year of Living Danishly - Helen Russell 2015

 

"It's not just Prius drivers, help-fans and hipsters who are passionate about the environment in Denmark. Being eco-friendly here is seen as a basic duty and something you do to be a part of Danish society."

"You know you're going to get taxed a lot anyway, so you may as well just focus on doing what you love, rather than what's going to land you a massive salary."

"'A fear of God isn't included in the Danish version of the Protestant religion,' explains Pernille."

"The Global Index of Religion and Atheism also assessed that poverty was a key indicator of a society's tendency towards religion - so that poorer countries tend to be more religious. The one exception tot the rule? America."

"Not long ago we [women] were second-rate citizens. We have to stay alert and be aware not to fall into old patterns. It's a big problem when young women - and men - don't have the historical perspective and mistakenly think that they're 'free' to do what they want, without seeing the structural and cultural forces that are still at work."

"Growing up in a female-centric bubble of delusion was a distinct advantage - it never occurred to me that I couldn't do absolutely anything."

"Danish preteens cover homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality and as the first country in the world to recognize registered partnerships for same-sex couples and the first European country to allow legal changes to gender without sterilization, Denmark has long placed an emphasis on inclusion."

"It's a bit like the school system and even the job market here - the individual has freedom within safe boundaries."

"One you trust 'the system' and can get your head around the fact that it's not trying to screw you over, it's easier to pay your taxes with grace 0 safe in the knowledge that the money is going to a good place."

"Danes want to be thought of as tolerant - it's important to them. And so The Danish Way is slowly adapting to incorporate new influences and arrivals."

[quotes] Lost Decades: the Making of America's Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery - Menzie D. Chinn and Jeffry A. Frieden 2011

  

"Republicans cut taxes to create deficits that restrained their opponents."

"Foreign borrowing, like any borrowing, makes sense if the borrowed money is used productively."

"Foreign debts made the good times better; they made the bad times worse."

"Facing a trade-off between recession now versus recession later makes the choice easy: you're in office now, somebody else will be in office later."

"Greater risks get lenders additional return on each dollar's investments. Leverage augmented this increased appetite for risk: owners of highly leveraged financial institutions have less of their own money at stake. If something goes wrong and the firm goes under, its owners' downside losses are limited to their own capital."

"As complexity grew, transparency declined. With each additional layer of securitization, it became more and more difficult to figure out the real worth of a given security, and in particular how risky it might be."

"A bank that is facing liquidity problems is out of ready cash; a bank that is insolvent is out of business."

"There are times when, in order to protect the innocent, society has to bail out the guilty, and this crisis was one of those times."

"Ironically, one of the principal results of the debt crisis [in Latin America] was a wave of democratization."

"Outrage grew apace, as the government threw hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money into bailing out some of those most responsible for the crisis, while the culprits continued to pay themselves huge bonuses."

"Merrill Lynch lost $27.6 billion in 2008, collapsed spectacularly, had to be bought by Bank of America, and was rescued with $10 billion in federal money; yet at the end of that disastrous year, its management approved bonuses of $3.6 billion."

"All of these reasons to worry about chronic, large-scale deficits are subsumed by the most important reason: they impose massive costs on future generations, who did nothing to incur them. Excessive borrowing now means that our descendants inherit a smaller capital stock and a smaller economy."

"Meanwhile, the country's taxpayers appear unwilling to accept that higher taxes are the price a society pays for the programs it adopts."

"National policies to address desperate national conditions ended up imposing costs on other countries - not on purpose, but as an unintended consequence of measures undertaken in grave circumstances under serious political stress."

"The danger [to globalization] is not a sudden plunge into trade wars, but a gradual erosion of support for compromise with commercial and financial partners, a gradual decline in patterns of cooperation and collaboration."

"John Maynard Keynes is said to have remarked, 'If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.' The same is true of countries: debtors can hold their creditors hostage just as surely as the other way around."

"A government (or firm, or household) does not impose externalities on others on purpose; they are an inadvertent result of self-interested behavior that does not take the well-being of neighbors into account."

"In both [the US and China], clearly, it's the producers who dominate currency politics; consumers are too disparate a group to play an organized role."

"But conscientious politicians have a duty to use their access to greater information and greater authority to avoid policy traps, not to exploit them."

"Americans need to decide which services they want their government to deliver and then pay for those services."

"Because the government taxes income rather than consumption, it makes consuming today more attractive than saving for the future."

"Institutions too big to fail create the possibility of 'private profits and socialized losses.'"

"Americans face a serious economic challenge. They lost the first decade of the century to a boom that enriched the wealthiest, and a subsequent bust that impoverished the rest."

"it is the job of policymakers to make difficult choices, informed by knowledge and understanding that the average citizen does not have."

[quotes] A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking 1988

 

"At early times the universe would probably be in a disordered state. This would mean that disorder would decrease with time. You would see broken cups gathering themselves together and jumping back onto the table. However, any human beings who were observing the cups would be living in a universe in which disorder decreased with time. I shall argue that such beings would have a psychological arrow of time that was backwards. That is, they would remember events in the future, and not remember events in their past. When the cup was broken, they would remember it being on the table, but when it was on the table, they would not remember it being on the floor."

[quotes] The Water Will Come - Jeff Goodell 2017

 

"eventually, when we've exhausted every other alternative we finally do the right thing."

"The loss of Venice is about the loss of a part of ourselves that reaches back in time and binds us together as civilized people."

"If it not built right , a wall can create as many problems as it solves."

"'Workers in the processing plants often don't get bathroom breaks and have to pee on themselves.'"

"...under the Compact of Free Association, there are no restrictions on the number of Marshallese who can come to America. The entire population of the country could move to Arkansas."

"'You can drastically reduce your greenhouse gas emissions so that the seas do not rise so much... Or, when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can let us in... Or, when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can shoot us. You pick.'" 

"Instead, many people in the military end up talking about climate in much the way eighth graders talk about sex - with code words and winks and suggestive language."

"Military leaders embraced desegregation long before the rest of the nation, in part because they wanted the best people they could find, no matter what color."

"In order words, just because I can tell you how to solve the problem, if it doesn't fit within the culture of this city and the future of this city, then it's not the right solution."

"It was as clear a picture of the insanity of modern life as I've ever seen."

"But the future will not take care of itself. It will be shaped by decisions we made yesterday and will make tomorrow."

"It also means that wealthy, politically connected residents will be able to dictate how and where cities and towns spend their money, which will of course mean less spending for poor neighborhoods that don't have the means to threaten lawsuits."

"... our memories adhere to places in surprising ways."

"'It is going to require a rethinking of the social contract between governments and citizens.'"

[quotes] Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig 1974

 

"It's a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it goes away."

"Not deliberately to irritate him but because the irritation seems symptomatic of something deeper, something under the surface that isn't immediately apparent."

"You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate."

"But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term."

"a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent."

"Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted."

"But the world as discovered by its scientific discoveries is also reality, and people in John's dimension will have to do more than just ignore it if they want to hang on to their vision of reality."

"A classic understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance."

"Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about."

"What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness. Familiarity can blind you too."

"We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world."

"Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts."

"He wanted to destroy it because the ghost was what he was and he wanted to be free from the bondage of his own identity."

"If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge."

"... needing these mountains in an almost physiological way."

"... and his thoughts were already independent to a degree few people are familiar with."

"It's so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it."

"What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses."

"The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them has to forego closeness with the people around him."

"No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt."

"If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed."

"'You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something."

"You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself."

"Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster."

"He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be 'here'."

"Definitions are the foundation of reason."

"When you are trained to despise 'just what you like' then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others - a good slave. When you learn not to do 'just what you like' then the System loves you."

"The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality."

"The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is."

"We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives."

"You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style."

"We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the results is not just bad, it is ghastly."

"The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there."

"A person filled with gumption doesn't sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He's at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what's up the track and meeting it when it comes. That's gumption."

"If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. Your ego isolates you from the Quality of reality."

"You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That's the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence."

"'Quality is the continuous stimulus which causes us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.'"

"The media has convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely."

"... the tendency to do what is 'reasonable' even when it isn't any good."

"A good student seeks knowledge fairly and impartially."

"'What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism,' Kitto comments, 'is not a sense of duty as we understand it - duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself. He strives after that which we translate "virtue" but is in Greek arete, "excellence".'"

"We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves."

"If it was all bricks and concrete, pure form of substance, clearly and openly, he might survive. It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality that kill. The plaster false fireplace in the apartment, shaped and waiting to contain a flame that can never exist. Or the hedge in front of the apartment building with a few feet of grass behind it. A few feet of grass, after Montana. If they just left out the hedge and grass it would be alright. Now it serves only to draw attention to what has been lost."

[quotes] Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates 2015

 

"But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible - this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white."

"that this is your county, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it"

"the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker"

"Fear fueled everything around me, and I knew, as all black people do, that this fear was connected to the Dream out there, to the unworried boys, to pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns nightly beamed into our television sets."

"Why are only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in special need of this morality."

"My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers - even the answers they themselves believed." 

"... some old power that made him speak as though his body were his own..."

"My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own." 

"They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental 'firsts' - first black five-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor - always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit."

"Things I believed merely a week earlier, ideas I had taken from one book, could be smashed to splinters by another."

"... and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts."

"... and allow the citizens of this county to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them."

"The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs."

"No one told those little white children, with their tricycles, to be twice as good. I imagined their parents telling them to take twice as much."

"Perhaps one person can make a change, but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countrymen."

"This is the foundation of the Dream - its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works."

"The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact."

[quotes] A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin 1996

 

"'A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.'"

"'You can't hammer tin into iron, no matter how hard you beat it, but that doesn't mean that tin is useless.'" 

[quotes] Looking for Alaska - John Green 2005

 

"I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails."

"'You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.'"

"What is the most important question human beings must answer? Choose your question wisely, and then examine how Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity attempt to answer it."

"... but I wanted to trust her, and so I did."

"She said it was sexist to leave the cooking to the women, but better to have good sexist food than crappy boy-prepared food."

"So she became impulsive, scared by her inaction into perpetual action."

"I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God."

"... we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth."

"We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken."