Quotes

All the quotes below are from the best quote collection in one link I’ve seen yet:

1. “It has always appalled me that really bright scientists almost all work in the most competitive fields, the ones in which they are making the least difference. In other words, if they were hit by a truck, the same discovery would be made by somebody else about 10 minutes later.” [Aubrey de Grey]

2. “I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.” [Daniel Dennett]

3. “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.” [Douglas Adams]

4. “When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to?” [George Bernard Shaw, A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)]

5. “You say that your opponent lacks humanity. It’s the oldest semantic weapon there is. Think of all the categories of people who’ve been classified as non-human, in various cultures, at various times. People from other tribes. People with other skin colors. Slaves. Women. The mentally ill. The deaf. Homosexuals. Jews. Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, Armenians, Kurds [...]

But suppose you accuse me of ‘lacking humanity.’ What does that actually mean? What am I likely to have done? Murdered someone in cold blood? Drowned a puppy? Eaten meat? Failed to be moved by Beethoven’s Fifth? Or just failed to have—or to seek—an emotional life identical to your own in every respect? Failed to share all your values and aspirations?

The answers is: ‘any one of the above.’ Which is why it’s so fucking lazy. Questioning someone’s ‘humanity’ puts them in the company of serial killers—which saves you the trouble of having to claim anything intelligent about their views.” [Greg Egan (as James Rourke), Distress]

6. “Voting in a democracy makes you feel powerful, much as playing the lottery makes you feel rich.” [Mencius Moldbug]

7. “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” [Christopher Hitchens]

8. “There is no real me! Don’t try to find the real me! Don’t try to find someone inside of me who isn’t me!” [Princess Waltz] – Yudkowsky’s comment to the quote: “What’s odd is not how many people think they contain other people. What’s odd is how many of those people think the other person is the real one.”

9. “Upon his death man must leave everything behind … and depart forever from the world he has known. He must of necessity go to that foul land of death, a fact which makes death the most sorrowful of all events. … Some foreign doctrines, however, teach that death should not be regarded as profoundly sorrowful. … These are all gross deceptions contrary to human sentiment and fundamental truths. Not to be happy over happy events, not to be saddened by sorrowful events, not to show surprise at astonishing events, in a word, to consider it proper not to be moved by whatever happens, are all foreign types of deception and falsehood. They are contrary to human nature and extremely repugnant to me.” [Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801)]

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I’m still at my parents, I’ll return to Aarhus tomorrow evening.