Barış Bayram

“Every standardized institution, by definition and design, is focused on efficiency above all else, and generic motives and universal motives are efficient ways of moving the needle—on average, at least. But they’re horrible for your own fulfillment. Not only do standardized views of motivation ignore everything that is important about who you are, but by incessantly focusing all of our attention on a small set of institutionally ordained motives, the Standardization Covenant constrains our thinking about what a personal motive can even be.
Fortunately, dark horses reveal the hidden truth about motivation. ... The lives of dark horses demonstrate the remarkable specificity of micro-motives.”
― Todd Rose, Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment

“In our own day, there has been too much of a tendency towards authority, and too little care for the preservation of initiative. Men in control of vast organisations have tended to be too abstract in their outlook, to forget what actual human beings are like, and to try to fit men to systems rather than systems to men.”
― Bertrand Russell, Authority and the Individual

“Fortunately, the metamorphosis came too late to permit me to go back to graduate school. And thus I escaped indoctrination. Whatever I learned about developmental psychology and social psychology, I learned on my own. I was an outsider looking in, and that has made all the difference. I did not buy
into the assumptions of the academic establishment. I was not indebted to their granting agencies. And, once I had given up writing textbooks, I was not required to perpetuate the status quo by teaching the received gospel to a bunch of credulous college students. I gave up writing textbooks because one day it suddenly occurred to me that many of the things I had been telling those credulous college students were wrong.”
― Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do

“Does moral progress occur incrementally? Or is it the result of sudden, punctuated social change? Given that cultural evolution, unlike biological evolution, can be guided by deliberate human innovation, both incrementalism and punctuation would seem to be live options.

... incrementalism does not mean embracing a stultifying conservatism that favors tradition over reform. Incremental, progressive moral evolution can be relatively fast and even quite groundbreaking. That is, positive moral revolutions do take place—such as the gay rights revolution ... Typically, large-scale moral progress begins with small-scale “experiments in living.” Instead of trying to re-design the culture of a society as a whole, small groups of people use moral reasoning to re-design the sub-culture of their local tribes. If the results of experiments are positive, then they can be adapted elsewhere and scaled up for larger and larger portions of society.

That being said, it’s possible that incremental moral change will not be sufficient to deal with the most serious threats to human survival. For example, perhaps something quite different—a moral black swan—is needed to address the problem of anthropogenic climate change. For this reason, we cannot be too confident that strategies that have worked in the past will also work in the future.”
― Victor Kumar, A Better Ape: The Evolution of the Moral Mind and How it Made us Human