“I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems. First, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.”
“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
“A problem well put is half solved.”
“The scientific revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the scientific revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.”
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and God-like technology.”
“An act of observation is itself part of the phenomenon observed and is analytically inseparable from it.”
“If there is something in nature you don’t understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: ‘innocent until proven guilty’ as opposed to ‘guilty until proven innocent’, let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.”
“Simplicity rarely loses to complexity in battles in the public square.”
“For measurement to be meaningful, knowing the resolution is crucial and integral to the entire process.”
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”