Michael > Michael's Quotes

“In Logo, the child controls a little turtle on-screen, issuing it commands to make it move around. The turtle draws a line wherever it goes, so it’s kind of like using a computerized Etch A Sketch. To draw a square, a child would tell the turtle to go forward thirty steps, turn right ninety degrees, then do the same thing three more times. Children quickly got the hang of it, using Logo to write programs that would draw all manner of things, like houses or cars. They’d laboriously write one instruction for each step of the picture, almost the way you’d set up the dots for a connect-the-dots drawing. To draw a bird, they’d connect two quarter circles together.”
― Anonymous

“Kids who are good at traditional school—repeating rote concepts and facts on a test—can fall apart in a situation where that isn’t enough. Programming rewards the experimental, curious mind.”
― Ketil Moland Olsen

“A 2007 U.S. government survey of 737 fifth-grade classrooms found that the students spent over 90 percent of their class time working solo or listening as a class to teacher lectures, while spending almost no time—not even 5 percent of the day—working collaboratively.”
― Anonymous

“As Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman document in their book Networked, people who are heavily socially active online tend to be also heavily socially active offline; they’re just, well, social people.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“Despots, it turns out, are learning to practice what journalist Rebecca MacKinnon calls “networked authoritarianism”—the use of the Internet to consolidate power. Rather than simply ban all digital communications, they realize, why not leave it partially open? Then dissidents will engage in public thinking and networking, which is a great way to keep tabs on them. “Before the advent of social media, it took a lot of effort for repressive governments to learn about the people dissidents are associated with,” as the writer Evgeny Morozov notes in The Net Delusion.”
― Anonymous

“Insight 1: Human decision making serves evolutionary goals. The traditional way of thinking about human behavior is based almost completely on a consideration of people’s surface goals—getting a decent bargain on a pair of dress shoes, for example, or picking a fine restaurant for a date next Saturday. But humans, like all animals, evolved to make choices in ways that promote deeper evolutionary purposes. Once we start looking at modern choices through this ancestral lens, many decisions that appear foolish and irrational at the surface level turn out to be smart and adaptive at a deeper evolutionary level. Insight 2: Human decision making is designed to achieve several very different evolutionary goals. Economists and psychologists have often assumed that humans seek a single broad goal: to feel good or to maximize benefits. In actuality, all humans pursue several very different evolutionary goals, such as acquiring a mate, protecting themselves from danger, and attaining status. This is an important distinction. Depending on which evolutionary goal they currently have in mind, consciously or subconsciously, people will have very different biases and make very different choices.”
― Anonymous

“Natural selection is a pretty efficient process, so if a behavior is found widely in humans and other species, it’s a better starting guess to presume it is adaptive rather than to assume it’s merely dumb.”
― Anonymous

“Just as it is too simple to say that people seek utility, it is too simple to say that people seek fitness. Instead, as we discuss next, human decision making is designed to achieve a set of very different evolutionary goals. In investigating how people meet these evolutionary goals, scientists have discovered something important: solutions to these different problems often require us to make decisions in different—and sometimes completely incompatible—ways. We are, in fact, inconsistent by design.”
― Anonymous

“But because humans are intensely social animals, they also faced a recurring set of crucial social evolutionary challenges. These evolutionary challenges include (1) evading physical harm, (2) avoiding disease, (3) making friends, (4) gaining status, (5) attracting a mate, (6) keeping that mate, and (7) caring for family.”
― Vladas Griskevicius, The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think

“The 2011 US budget included $60 billion for “protection” and another $964 billion for “defense.” With a population of 311 million people, that averages out to $3,294.60 spent by every man, woman, and child for government protection. That does not include the additional taxes you pay to support your local police, incidentally.”
― Anonymous

“Natural selection creates systems, like the brain, that are biased to minimize the costlier error. This built-in bias to avoid evolutionarily expensive errors is known as the smoke detector principle. Evolutionary psychologists Martie Haselton and Randy Nesse believe that natural selection engineered human judgment and decision making to be biased according to the same principle. Like a good smoke detector, our brain is rigged to sound the alarm even when there is no fire, forcing us to tolerate the inconvenience of false alarms to avoid potentially lethal misses. Because our evolutionary tendencies steer us toward avoiding costly errors, our decisions will result in more small errors. But we are disposed to produce little errors so that we avoid big mistakes.”
― Anonymous

“Indeed, there is an emerging body of evidence to suggest that we are all modern cavemen, approaching the problems of our complex contemporary world using brains that evolved to confront ancestral problems.”
― Anonymous

“Why is learning to talk easy while learning to write is difficult? The answer lies in our evolutionary history. Our ancestors have been talking for hundreds of thousands of years. The ability to talk gave such an advantage that humans across the world have been naturally selected for being good talkers. Talking is like walking.”
― Anonymous