Daniel Cornwall > Daniel's Quotes

“It's hard to wipe your eyes when you have whirring buzzsaws for hands.”
― Daniel H. Wilson, How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“I'll tell you this. Leaving that which you love breaks your heart open. But you will find a jewel inside, and this precious jewel is the opening of your heart to all that is new and all that is different, and it will be the making of you-if you allow it to be.”
― Jacqueline Winspear, Leaving Everything Most Loved

“What’s more, attempting to score a teacher’s effectiveness by analyzing the test results of only twenty-five or thirty students is statistically unsound, even laughable. The numbers are far too small given all the things that could go wrong. Indeed, if we were to analyze teachers with the statistical rigor of a search engine, we’d have to test them on thousands or even millions of randomly selected students.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“According to the American Civil Liberties Union, sentences imposed on black men in the federal system are nearly 20 percent longer than those for whites convicted of similar crimes.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“A 2013 study by the New York Civil Liberties Union found that while black and Latino males between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four made up only 4.7 percent of the city’s population, they accounted for 40.6 percent of the stop-and-frisk checks by police. More than 90 percent of those stopped were innocent.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“The trouble was that the rankings were self-reinforcing. If a college fared badly in U.S. News, its reputation would suffer, and conditions would deteriorate. Top students would avoid it, as would top professors. Alumni would howl and cut back on contributions. The ranking would tumble further. The ranking, in short, was destiny.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“By leaving cost out of the formula, it was as if U.S. News had handed college presidents a gilded checkbook. They had a commandment to maximize performance in fifteen areas, and keeping costs low wasn’t one of them.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“It’s easy to raise graduation rates, for example, by lowering standards. Many students struggle with math and science prerequisites and foreign languages. Water down those requirements, and more students will graduate. But if one goal of our educational system is to produce more scientists and technologists for a global economy, how smart is that? It would also be a cinch to pump up the income numbers for graduates. All colleges would have to do is shrink their liberal arts programs, and get rid of education departments and social work departments while they’re at it, since teachers and social workers make less money than engineers, chemists, and computer scientists. But they’re no less valuable to society.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Anywhere you find the combination of great need and ignorance, you’ll likely see predatory ads. If people are anxious about their sex lives, predatory advertisers will promise them Viagra or Cialis, or even penis extensions. If they are short of money, offers will pour in for high-interest payday loans. If their computer is acting sludgy, it might be a virus inserted by a predatory advertiser, who will then offer to fix it. And as we’ll see, the boom in for-profit colleges is fueled by predatory ads.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Just imagine if police enforced their zero-tolerance strategy in finance. They would arrest people for even the slightest infraction, whether it was chiseling investors on 401ks, providing misleading guidance, or committing petty frauds. Perhaps SWAT teams would descend on Greenwich, Connecticut. They’d go undercover in the taverns around Chicago’s Mercantile Exchange.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Such tests now are used on 60 to 70 percent of prospective workers in the United States, up from 30 to 40 percent about five years ago, estimates Josh Bersin of the consulting firm Deloitte.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“In many companies, managers’ pay is contingent upon the efficiency of their staff as measured by revenue per employee hour. Scheduling software helps them boost these numbers and their own compensation. Even when executives tell managers to loosen up, they often resist. It goes against everything they’ve been taught. What’s more, at Starbucks, if a manager exceeds his or her “labor budget,” a district manager is alerted, said one employee. And that could lead to a write-up. It’s usually easier just to change someone’s schedule, even if it means violating the corporate pledge to provide one week’s notice.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Scheduling software can be seen as an extension of the just-in-time economy. But instead of lawn mower blades or cell phone screens showing up right on cue, it’s people, usually people who badly need money. And because they need money so desperately, the companies can bend their lives to the dictates of a mathematical model.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Seven years after A Nation at Risk was published with such fanfare, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories took a second look at the data gathered for the report. These people were no amateurs when it came to statistics—they build and maintain nuclear weapons—and they quickly found the error. Yes, it was true that SAT scores had gone down on average. However, the number of students taking the test had ballooned over the course of those seventeen years. Universities were opening their doors to more poor students and minorities. Opportunities were expanding. This signaled social success. But naturally, this influx of newcomers dragged down the average scores. However, when statisticians broke down the population into income groups, scores for every single group were rising, from the poor to the rich.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Why had I not understood that this was not simply the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the church of his tomb? It was also the Church of the Resurrection.”
― James Martin, Jesus: A Pilgrimage – A New York Times Bestselling Meditation on Christ, Scripture, and Faith in the Holy Land

“He’d take his own lime and squeeze it into her glass, too. He’d squeeze the two wedges in and then throw them in with the ice. It seemed like a beautiful thing to have, somebody giving you their lime wedge. I mean, I hate lime, actually. But you get the point.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“Why do the options of wind, solar, and biofuels flow from our minds so freely as solutions to our various energy dilemmas while conservation and walkable neighborhoods do not?”
― Ozzie Zehner, Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism

“Parents could see what was happening to their own children, who were being drawn to electronic devices—cell phones, computers, and iPads—as if to opium-infused cupcakes.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

“He mocked Dayton as a “one-horse Tennessee village” and its citizens the “gaping primates of the upland valleys.”7 Yet whenever a fundamentalist movement is attacked, either with violence or in a media campaign, it almost invariably becomes more extreme.”
― Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence

“It’s the first article in the constitution. ‘Access to information shall not be abridged.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar

“What we rarely do is recognize the way glass supports this entire network: we take pictures through glass lenses, store and manipulate them on circuit boards made of fiberglass, transmit them around the world via glass cables, and enjoy them on screens made of glass. It’s silicon dioxide all the way down the chain.”
― Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

“Amazingly, life went on largely undisturbed as Chesbrough’s team raised the city’s buildings. One British visitor observed a 750-ton hotel being lifted, and described the surreal experience in a letter: “The people were in [the hotel] all the time coming and going, eating and sleeping—the whole business of the hotel proceeding without interruption”
― Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

“What we hope for includes the wise human leadership and initiative which will, like that of Joseph in Egypt, bring about fresh and healing policies and actions”
― N.T. Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath

“This impulse at the heart of Christianity is the human will to share with others what one has found meaningful to oneself elevated to the height of a moral imperative. But there is a lurking danger in this very emphasis. It is exceedingly difficult to hold oneself free from a certain contempt for those whose predicament makes moral appeal for defense and succor. It is the sin of pride and arrogance that has tended to vitiate the missionary impulse and to make of it an instrument of self-righteousness on the one hand and racial superiority on the other.”
― Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

“It has long been a matter of serious moment that for decades we have studied the various peoples of the world and those who live as our neighbors as objects of missionary endeavor and enterprise without being at all willing to treat them either as brothers or as human beings.”
― Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

“If a man knows precisely what he can do to you or what epithet he can hurl against you in order to make you lose your temper, your equilibrium, then he can always keep you under subjection.”
― Howard Thurman

“It is a subject that is taboo unless there is some extraordinary social crisis—such as war—involving the mobilization of all the national resources of the common life to meet it. There is a conspiracy of silence about hatred, its function and its meaning.”
― Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

“*wakes up and looks at phone* ah let’s see what fresh horrors await me on the fresh horrors device –@MISSOKISTIC IN A TWEET ON NOVEMBER 10, 2016”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“Erecting barriers against the existential is not new—before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions—but the advanced technologies of the twenty-first-century attention economy are particularly effective at this task.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World