Zinaida

“Of course, no one’s immune to these biases; I’ve caught myself cherry-picking data on more than one occasion. To that extent we all live in glass houses. But there are ways of error-checking yourself, if you care to use them. The scientific method, at its heart, is a set of tools explicitly designed to break through bias and shine a light on the empirical information underneath. Recognizing our prejudices, we can overcome them. But one thing we cannot do—and it has taken me so very long to realize this—is reason successfully with those who reject such tools. Logic doesn’t matter to a Jehovah’s Witness. Fossils mean nothing to a creationist. All the data in the world will not change the mind of a true climate-change denier.4 You cannot reason with these people. You cannot take them seriously. It is a waste of energy to even try.”
― Peter Watts, Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays

“We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Hell, Neil Gaiman took a classic that nine-year-old Peter Watts devoured without any trouble at all—Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book—and dumbed it down to an (admittedly award-winning) story about ghosts and vampires, aimed at an audience who might find a story about sapient wolves and tigers too challenging. It may only be a matter of time before Nineteen Eighty Four is reissued using only words from the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.”
― Peter Watts, Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays