Liam > Liam's Quotes

“Discovering you were wrong is an update, not a failure, and your worldview is a living document meant to be revised.”
― Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: The Perils of Defensive Thinking and How to Be Right More Often

“When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

“Mental acuity of any kind comes from solving problems yourself, not from being told how to solve them.”
― Paul Lockhart, A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form

“School began as an institution that rescued young people from degrading labor. Now schools are the perpetuators of degrading labor.”
― Blake Boles, Why Are You Still Sending Your Kids to School?: the case for helping them leave, chart their own paths, and prepare for adulthood at their own pace

“The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

“As bitcoin approaches infinite stock to flow ratio it will be the soundest money in existence. Infinite soundness is hard to beat.”
― Gigi, 21 Lessons: What I've Learned from Falling Down the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole

“Networks like schools are not communities, just as school training is not education. By preempting fifty percent of the total time of the young, by locking young people up with other young people exactly their own age, by ringing bells to start and stop work, by asking people to think about the same thing at the same time in the same way, by grading people the way we grade vegetables—and in a dozen other vile and stupid ways—network schools steal the vitality of communities and replace it with an ugly mechanism.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

“He took Aeron and most of the C++ developers with him and created a whole new Ethereum client on the more cutting-edge Rust language.”
― Camila Russo, The Infinite Machine

“One of the most ironic paradoxes of our time is this great availability of leisure that somehow fails to be translated into enjoyment.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“Ideally, the end of extrinsically applied education should be the start of an education that is motivated intrinsically. At that point the goal of studying is no longer to make the grade, earn a diploma, and find a good job. Rather, it is to understand what is happening around one, to develop a personally meaningful sense of what one’s experience is all about.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“The one essential is that a society be constituted in which the exploitation and domination of man by man are impossible. That the society, in other words, be such that the means of existence and development of labor be free and open to every one, and all be able to co-operate, according to their wishes and their knowledge, in the organization of social life.”
― Errico Malatesta, Anarchy

“What does it mean to call for a “democratic” solution if you don’t have a conflict-resolution mechanism in mind?
I think it means that you have said the word “democracy,” so the audience is supposed to cheer. It’s not so much a propositional statement, as the equivalent of the “Applause” light that tells a studio audience when to clap.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies

“Reflection opens the avenue to criticism, and the folkways may not like criticism. In this way, ideologies become closed circles, primed to feel outraged by the questioning mind.”
― Simon Blackburn, Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

“Good work is no done by ‘humble’ men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking ‘Is what I do worth while?’ and ‘Am I the right person to do it?’ will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others.”
― G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology

“This failure to relate classroom topics to their eventual application in the real world is one of the central shortcomings of our broken classroom model, and is a direct consequence of our habit of rushing through conceptual modules and pronouncing them finished when in fact only a very shallow level of functional understanding has been reached.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Many of the things we need to do are so obvious they are banal: slow down, do one thing at a time, sleep more. But even though at some level we all know them to be true, we are in fact moving in the opposite direction: toward more speed, more switching, less sleep.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again