Great Throughts Treasury

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

"A recent study found that non-abused six- to fourteen-month-olds who showed disregard for others? distress were significantly more likely to be antisocial as adolescents."

"A system that makes no errors is not intelligent."

"After all, there have never been loonies carrying signs saying, The End is Not Near."

"An individual?s moral obligation in the situation is to ?call it as he sees it? without consideration of what others say."

"After several decades of empirical study, Jaques concluded that just as humans differ in intelligence, we differ in our ability to handle time-dependent complexity. We all have a natural time horizon we are comfortable with: what Jaques called time span of discretion, or the length of the longest task an individual can successfully undertake."

"A patient can have as many diagnoses as [she] damn well pleases."

"As a final insult to unity, the laws of quantum mechanics indicate that the universe is continually splitting into multiple histories, or many worlds, out of which the world we experience is only one. The other worlds contain the events that didn?t happen in our world."

"Adolescence is a period of life when the brain is malleable, and it represents a good opportunity for learning and social development. However, according to UNICEF, 40 percent of the world?s teenagers have no access to secondary-school education. The percentage of teenage girls who lack this access is much higher, yet there is strong evidence that the education of girls in developing countries has many significant benefits for family health, population growth rates, child mortality rates, and HIV rates, as well as for women?s self-esteem and quality of life. Adolescence represents a time of brain development when teaching and training should be particularly beneficial. I worry about the lost opportunity of denying the world?s teenagers access to education."

"As the French cognitive scientist Dan Sperber put it, cultures are epidemics of mental representations."

"Bad behavior is seen as something to be noticed, reported on, and analyzed, whereas people who do not lie and cheat are taken for granted."

"But there is another case for curating as a vanguard activity for the twenty-first century. As the artist Tino Sehgal has pointed out, modern societies find themselves today in an unprecedented situation: The problem of lack, or scarcity, which has been the primary factor motivating scientific and technological innovation, is now joined and even superseded by the problem of the global effects of overproduction and resource use. Thus, moving beyond the object as the locus of meaning has a further relevance. Selection, presentation, and conversation are ways for human beings to create and exchange real value, without dependence on older, unsustainable processes. Curating can take the lead in pointing us toward this crucial importance of choosing."

"But discoveries are what usually egg us on. Not finding anything would be very bad indeed."

"By undercutting fundamentalism and intolerance, education would curtail violence and war. By empowering women, it would curb poverty and the population explosion."

"Can it be that all of physics?and, indeed, all of science?is based on creating all the matter in the universe from a dozen objects with totally random mass values, while no one has the faintest idea about their origin?"

"Change is the law. Stability and consistency are illusions, temporary in any case, a heroic achievement of human will and persistence at best. When we want things to stay the same, we'll always wind up playing catch-up."

"Cancer will be understood properly only by positioning it within the great sweep of evolutionary history."

"Children need practice dealing with other people. With people, practice never leads to perfect. But perfect isn?t the goal. Perfect is the goal only in a simulation. Children become fearful of not being in control in a domain where control is not the point. Beyond this, children use conversations with one another to learn how to have conversations with themselves. For children growing up, the capacity for self-reflection is the bedrock of development. I worry that the holding power of the screen does not encourage this. It jams that inner voice by offering continual interactivity or continual connection. Unlike time with a book, where one?s mind can wander and there is no constraint on time out for self-reflection, apps bring children back to the task at hand just when a child?s mind should be allowed to wander. So in addition to taking children away from conversation with other children, too much time with screens can take children away from themselves. It is one thing for adults to choose distraction over self-reflection. But children need to learn to hear their own voices."

"Civilizations do fail. We have never seen one that hasn?t. The difference is that the torch of progress has, in the past, always passed to another region of the world. But we now for the first time have a single, global civilization. If it fails, we all fail together."

"Commitment to spooky, non-empirical entities ranging from human rights to the Word of God to the coming proletarian Utopia."

"Computers are fine, but it?s time to return to the mind itself and stop pretending we have computers for brains."

"Consider the world we could live in if all of our local and global leaders, if all of our personal and professional friends and foes, recognized the defeasibility of their beliefs and acted accordingly. That sure sounds like progress to me. But of course I could be wrong."

"Economics graduate students are far more likely to free-ride than other students."

"Every aspect of life is an experiment that can be better understood if it is perceived in that way."

"Contrary to what our brains are telling us, there?s no mystical force that imbues a winner with a streak of luck, nor is there a cosmic sense of justice."

"Creativity is a fragile flower, but perhaps it can be fertilized with systematic doses of serendipity."

"Defeasible beliefs provide the provisional certainty necessary to navigate an uncertain world."

"Filters fail when they know us too well and when they don?t know us well enough."

"Evolution by means of natural selection (or indeed any kind of selection?natural or unnatural) provides the most beautiful, elegant explanation in all of science."

"For me, the laws that apply to animals apply to us. And in that view of life, there is grandeur enough."

"Happy brains are all alike; every unhappy brain is unhappy in its own way."

"Human achievement is based on collective intelligence?the nodes in the human neural network are people themselves. By each doing one thing and getting good at it, then sharing and combining the results through exchange, people become capable of doing things they do not even understand."

"Human beings are impossibly complex tarballs of muscle, blood, bone, breath, and electrical pulses that travel through nerves and neurons; we are bundles of electrical pulses carrying payloads, pings hitting servers. And our identities are inextricably connected to our environments: No story can be told without a setting."

"Human beings are the unequivocal world champions of niceness. We act kindly not only toward people who belong to our own social groups or can reciprocate our generosity but also toward strangers thousands of miles away who will never know we helped them. All around the world, people sacrifice their resources, well-being, and even their lives in the service of others."

"Hustle to keep your kids on or off the Internet, eating organic or local or nothing at all. Take these actions, or none. Just don?t worry about them. There is nothing to worry about, and there never was."

"I part because those countries have switched their foundational ideologies from ones that glorify zero-sum class and national struggle to ones that glorify positive-sum market cooperation."

"I believe that consciousness is, essentially, the way information feels when being processed."

"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn?t be called research."

"I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?"

"If the concept that technologies have biases were to become common knowledge, we could implement them consciously and purposefully. If we don?t bring this concept into general awareness, our technologies and their effects will continue to threaten and confound us."

"If, by contrast, you think that uncovering your mistakes is one of the best ways to revise and improve your understanding of the world, then this is actually a highly optimistic insight."

"If we wish to understand why, as humans, we often act in certain predictable ways (and particularly if there is a desire or need to change these behavioral responses), we can remember our animal heritage and look for the possible releasers that seem to stimulate our fixed-action patterns."

"In case you?re interested. (It was the Soviet attack on Japan that forced Hirohito to surrender to save his war-criminal?s"

"In 1900, Lord Kelvin, the great British physicist, put it clearly: There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."

"Impatience is a contagion spread from gadget to gadget."

"In its quest to prove itself as the supreme form of secular knowledge, science has inadvertently elevated itself into a theology."

"In part because those countries have switched their foundational ideologies from ones that glorify zero-sum class and national struggle to ones that glorify positive-sum market cooperation."

"In science the credit goes to the man who convinced the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs."

"In fact nobody died, nobody became ill, and nobody is expected to."

"Income is an important determinant of people?s satisfaction with their lives, but it is far less important than most people think. If everyone had the same income, the differences among people in life satisfaction would be reduced by less than 5 percent."