Terrance Blackthorn > Terrance's Quotes

“I think it's always going to be easier to build a dystopia than a utopia and easier to build a utopia than something realistic.”
― Adam Becker

“If we want a future that puts people first, we need to recognize that there are no panaceas, and likely no utopias either. Nothing is coming to save us. There is no genie inside a computer that will grant us three wishes. Technology can't heal the world. We have to do that ourselves.”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it ... To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it--everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not interactive with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everyone is up to it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“The debates about evolution, global warming, and homeopathy have been explicitly manufactured and funded by a variety of corporate, religious, and political entities from outside science, who are not in the least interested in the quest to divorce our human biases from our understanding of the world. They are not committed to taking the science seriously and are instead devoted to taking their own aims and giving them a thin patina of scientific respectability, enough to justify their claims to equal or greater validity than the existing and overwhelming scientific consensus. These groups are not interested in examining the data and happily reject it when it does not meet their preordained conclusions, inventing new “data” to suit their purposes. In the cases of global warming and evolution, these “controversies” were invented to push back against a perceived political agenda on the part of science and scientists. And the forces behind intelligent design and climate change denial were not wrong about that—science is political, and always has been, in that it informs decisions about the best policies in the public sphere, as well it should. And science certainly is a threat to the institutions pushing these antiscience agendas. Science will always be a political threat to some institutions, simply by virtue of its attempts to respect no authority other than data and logic. So much the worse for those institutions. And that’s another sign that these “debates” are not like the debate over quantum foundations—because those working against the scientific consensus are allied with (and often funded by) groups that are simply against the idea of science itself, like some fundamentalist religious groups.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“Audre Lorde said you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. I think about this powerful metaphor, trying to understand it.

By radicals, liberals, conservatives, and reactionaries, education in the masters’ knowledge is seen as leading inevitably to consciousness of oppression and exploitation, and so to the subversive desire for equality and justice. Liberals support and reactionaries oppose universal free education, public schools, uncensored discussion at the universities for exactly the same reason.

Lorde’s metaphor seems to say that education is irrelevant to social change. If nothing the master used can be useful to the slave, then education in the masters’ knowledge must be abandoned. Thus an underclass must entirely reinvent society, achieve a new knowledge, in order to achieve justice. If they don’t, the revolution will fail.

This is plausible. Revolutions generally fail. But I see their failure beginning when the attempt to rebuild the house so everybody can live in it becomes an attempt to grab all the saws and hammers, barricade Ole Massa’s toolroom, and keep the others out. Power not only corrupts, it addicts. Work becomes destruction. Nothing is built.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Imagination and the Art of Writing and Reading