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“I don’t see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia.” “But it keeps not ending.” “So far, so good.”
he would have been lost except he started out lost and when you start out completely lost, it’s hard to get loster.
If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.
If I know that the teacher is wrong, and say nothing, then I remain the only one who knows, and that gives me an advantage over those who believe the teacher.
If they’re good commanders, they’ll use you effectively in combat no matter how they despise you. But they don’t have to be helpful to you in advancing your career.
a lot of human behavior was really acting out our responses to dangers long past.
“Male and female created he them. Making his image anatomically vague, one must suppose.”
“Yes, I’m paranoid and xenophobic. That’s how I got this job. Cultivate those virtues and you, too, might rise to my lofty station.”
“In my view, suicide is not really the wish for life to end.” “What is it, then?” “It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.”
“We don’t use the word ‘intelligence’ with software. We regard that as a naive idea. We say that it’s ‘complex.’ Which means that we don’t always understand what it’s doing. We don’t always get conclusive information.”
Flattery rarely fails, and never does if it’s sincere.
without outside stimulation it was hard to break free of his own assumptions. One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.
