No individual, deterministic machine, however universal this class of machines is proving to be, will ever think in the sense that we think. Intelligence may be ever-increasing among such
machines, but genuinely creative intuitive thinking requires nondeterministic machines that can make mistakes, abandon logic from one moment to the next, and learn. Thinking is not as logical as we think.
– George Dyson
Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.
There’s no such thing as a worry-free investment. The trick is to separate the valid worries from the idle worries, and then check the worries against the facts.
Planning and preparation are useful until they become a form of procrastination.
Is this task enhancing my actions or substituting for them?
The telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.
If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel of wine, you get sewage.
Wealth is created… primarily by knowledge and cooperation: networks of people arrange matter into improbable but useful configurations and combine the fruits of their ingenuity and labor. The corollary is that we can figure out how to make more wealth.
– Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now
The nature of illusion is that it’s designed to make you feel good. About yourself, about your country, about where you’re going – in that sense it functions like a drug. Those who question that illusion are challenged not so much for the veracity of what they say, but for puncturing those feelings.