Brad Dunn > Brad's Quotes

“Nothing about our world is inconsistent with the existence of a multiverse.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“It takes some mental acrobatics to be an intellectual racist in the light of the scientific information we have today, but those who want to do it, will.”
― Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science

“When we claim ethnic or racial pride, what are we doing but trying to piggyback on the achievements of those who went before us?”
― Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science

“Many people with perfectly good intentions end up committing a lot of statistical errors because of lack of training and something we call wish bias, which is this idea that you want to find something interesting so you keep sifting through the data and fishing around until you find something interesting.”
― Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science

“the amount of information a communication medium supplies is less important than the way the medium presents the information and the way, in turn, our minds take it in.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“What both enthusiast and skeptic miss is what McLuhan saw: that in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“Descartes may have been wrong about dualism, but he appears to have been correct in believing that our thoughts can exert a physical influence on, or at least cause a physical reaction in, our brains. We become, neurologically, what we think.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“In the most extreme expression of the determinist view, human beings become little more than “the sex organs of the machine world,”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“As a group of Northwestern University professors wrote in a 2005 article in the Annual Review of Sociology, the recent changes in our reading habits suggest that the “era of mass [book] reading” was a brief “anomaly” in our intellectual history: “We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.” The question that remains to be answered, they went on, is whether that reading class will have the “power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital” or will be viewed as the eccentric practitioners of “an increasingly arcane hobby.”20”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“never has there been a medium that, like the Net, has been programmed to so widely scatter our attention and to do it so insistently.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“In some ways, this is the ultimate goal of theoretical physics: to find a way to take all the complicated messy stuff we see around us and rearrange it into something pretty and compact and simple that just looks complicated because of our weird low-energy perspective.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“Every attempt to bend some part of the world to our will creates disorder somewhere else, often in the form of heat.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“Universal computers are capable of performing all the computations permitted by the laws of physics. Once a universal computer is constructed, all you have to do is to load it with the right programme, and it can simulate any other system that is physically allowed. This includes the biosphere, with all its splendid richness of animals, plants, and microorganisms; and, in principle, it even includes your brain, together with thoughts and emotions.”
― Chiara Marletto, The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals

“Just as the theory of information led to the theory of universal computation, this theory I am envisaging could be the seed for designing a machine that generalises the universal computer, which scientists call the universal constructor.”
― Chiara Marletto, The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals

“These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time. This can happen when one is finding one’s way through a blizzard of text messages; it can happen when interacting with a robot. I feel witness for a third time to a turning point in our expectations of technology and ourselves. We bend to the inanimate with new solicitude. We fear the risks and disappointments of relationships with our fellow humans. We expect more from technology and less from each other.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Like the coronavirus pandemic, the current infodemic is a global phenomenon. We need to tackle it on an international level to avoid adding a third layer to this worldwide crisis: a societal one.”
― Julia Ebner, Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists

“movements tend to be more effective when they don’t go against existing power structures, but instead exploit the inner contradictions of dominating ideologies to reframe their notions and ideas.”
― Julia Ebner, Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists

“Psychological studies show that specific gaming designs such as badges, leaderboards and performance graphs can be powerful tools to maximise customer participation and brand loyalty.”
― Julia Ebner, Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists

“Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, people, and ages, it is the rule,”
― Julia Ebner, Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists