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Kindle Notes & Highlights
our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.”
the RCO impoverishes us, all of us, and brings us closer to that primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “the war of every man against every man.”
“The diagnosis is the treatment.
that happiness is something one cannot aim straight at, but rather can achieve only by focusing on other good things,
“Honour thy error as a hidden intention.”
“race to the bottom of the brain stem.
“Thinking as a Hobby,” Annie Dillard’s “Seeing”
“Politics and the English Language” remains. Reading those essays with my students, trying to get them
calls “backshadowing”—“foreshadowing after the fact,”
the monochromaticism of the protagonist’s little world to the Technicolor variety of the world outside.
that bringing analytical power to bear on a problem is not enough, especially if one’s goal is to make the world a better place.
8 This is thinking: the power to be finely aware and richly responsible.
“Critical Thinking About Critical Thinking”:
“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.”
“mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly,
moral intuitions accomplish two things: they bind and they blind.
“Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices.”
The draw of the Inner Ring
“Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.”*4
opinion. Strict orthodoxy is as much the result of mutual suspicion as of ardent faith.
survival-of-the-obsequious world
“What I have learned, working here, is that smart, successful people are cursed. The curse is confidence. It’s confidence that comes from a lifetime of success after real success, an objectively great job, working at an objectively great company, making a measurably great salary, building products that get millions of users. You must be smart. In fact, you are smart. You can prove it.”
“Error has no rights.”
“Error has no rights, but the man who errs has equal rights with him who errs not.”*4
“wisdom of repugnance,”
intimacy gradients.
“online disinhibition effect,”
“the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings…when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives,”
“The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.”
when people have limited or nonexistent emotional responses to situations, whether through injury or congenital defect, their decision making is seriously compromised.
out, reason alone is an insufficient guide to action.
a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.
human choices are irrational, when in fact our research only showed that Humans are not well described by the rational-agent model.”
that reading can make a man already inclined toward foolishness far, far more foolish.
brilliant essay called “Terministic Screens,”
“It’s not either-or, it’s both-and!”—
away. In the life of thought, holding a position is like that: there’s a proper firmness of belief that lies between the extremes of rigidity and flaccidity.
purity. But as Jesus said, it is not what we take in that defiles us, it’s what we send out.
“A book is like a mirror: if a donkey looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”
“The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to auricular confession: Be brief, be blunt, be gone.”*3
Value learning over debating. Don’t “talk for victory.”
