Economic theory as derived from Adam Smith assumes first that homo economicus acts with perfect optimality on complete information, and second that when many of the species homo economicus do that, their actions add up to the best possible outcome for everybody. Neither of these assumptions stands up long against the evidence.
~ Donella Meadows
:::
The exile will always be at least slightly alien to her adopted culture. At the same time, her knowledge of that new place and its people is immersive; she is not a tourist and she can never really return to the person she was before she left home. This duality is also the novelist’s superpower.
~ Gal Beckerman via The Atlantic
:::
Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people’s level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization.
~ Arthur Koestler
:::
It’s hardly surprising that the rapid transition to widespread remote work led to a greater quantity of digital communication. Especially in the early weeks of the pandemic, Zoom and Slack offered a lifeline of sorts for newly isolated members of the cubicle diaspora. But it’s striking that, even as work returned to a more stable rhythm, with more time spent back in physical offices, the amount of digital communication has remained high.
~ Cal Newport via The New Yorker
:::
As with taxation and relations between the sexes, higher education is essentially and continuously contested territory. Given the history of that crisis rhetoric, one’s natural response to the current cries of desperation might reasonably be one of boredom.
~ John Searle
:::
Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or in antithesis, never as a means of evasion.
~ William Strunk, Jr.
:::
The divine is everywhere, even in a grain of sand.
~ Caspar David Friedrich
:::
A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent.
~ Niccolò Machiavelli
:::
Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
:::
Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavour consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?
~ Friedrich Hayek
:::