All time favorite quotes
rehashing my list of #ALLTIMEFAVORITEQUOTES
Favorite Quotes
http://simfishthoughts.wordpress.com/favorite-quotes/
“every calorie must fight for its existence” - bryan johnson
I highly encourage you all to think deeply about the Huygens–Fresnel principle applied to "waves of awareness".
I've yet to encounter a counter-example. And I think it might even be an "open window" into realizing the One Electron Universe, Zero Ontology, and/or Open Individualism. Well, that's a big claim
but... Maybe think about it!
Whether it is during Jhana meditation, Wim Hof, THC, LSD, DMT, or one of their combinations, one always find that the more coherent one's waves are, the more uncertain one is about "where they are". The more uncertain one is about "who one is" and what one's "precise location" is.
When you achieve very high levels of coherence (say, when you "embody" or "merge with" a vertical standing wave pattern from head to toe, like, say, horizontal zebra stripes) one always seems to exit into a realm where you know precisely your frequency but you know absolutely nothing about your spatial location. It's quite literally like being "spread evenly" over an entire region! It's as if the elections/particles that make up the standing wave merge into a continuous and uniform point of view.
I suspect that all mystical experiences involve an element of this. That is, achieving a level of coherence where you get "absorbed" into a standing wave pattern that "cannot know where it is" because it is perfectly symmetrical along some axis. Does this make any sense?” - andres gomez emilson
Andrés Gómez Emilsson on Twitte
“The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.”
― Elon Musk
We are snowboarding with an avalanche behind us (this is the sum of P(doom)s + P(catastrophe)s due to current tech, stagnation, the crooked timber of humanity). Going too fast down the mountain may increase one particular P(doom), but we must maintain a high enough speed and also control to avoid the sum of the rest and achieve safety.
Michael Gibson
"The meta plot is to identify the chosen ones of every transhumanist subplot and egg them on. This is laying the seeds of a religion."
"Stop giving things credence for getting traction" - Sarah Constantin
The reason I detest IQ as our measure of intelligence is that it is pretty good. It would be far better if it was either absolutely amazing or obviously wrong. We can’t afford pretty good. A pretty good metric for cognition which some say is great can be a true social nightmare. Eric Weinstein
"if early deficits in love are not met, all intellectual work is actually work that is for social acceptance. But being able to focus on a thing requires deep and loving self-acceptance and full sense of being approving of oneself on both local and global scale" - bushra
“forever grateful to my early failures for disqualifying me from conventional status games and teaching me that the only way to win is to flourish on my own terms” - ashley zhang
“insanity is doing things the same thing over again and expecting different results”
"Everything is for thiel" - sam trautwein
""The internal story helps them achieve modest effects locally, but these are side effects ofsocializing. Its members might individually pursue actions towards the organization’s goal, perhaps even believing they are pursuing them effectively; however, the social interface rewards appearance rather than reality, hence close cooperation towards the organization’s goals cannot materialize.
One sign and symptom of this simple optimization for appearance is that everyone in the organization is trying to perform the same kind of task, the one that is most socially rewarded, rather than them being specialized according to their function." - from samo burja's great founder theory
"Not only do our actions matter, I believe they matter eternally" - thiel
"I spend more time thinking about what not to watch/read than the inverse. What's your split? I'm not sure if this is right, so thinking about revising this year." - Laura Deming
"The funny thing about the linguistic choices of English-speaking young people is that they tend to predict the evolution of the English language as a whole by about half a generation. So you may as well get used to that writing style. It's probably not going anywhere. 🤷" - Kara
"|The most effective way to coax someone out of the mainstream is to make them feel safe with strong emotional bonds. The deeper you know someone, the better you can do this. And then they can actually create things."
" if I ever become really normie please stage an intervention for me and bring me back to the edgy side." - jhadfield
"I sometimes suffer from lack of awareness of what's weird anymore" - Shoshannah Tekofsky
"There’s no greater good I can do in this world beyond inspiring discouraged super-learners who have been shamed as “learning disabled”.
If you’re smart but can’t sit still, have terrible handwriting, struggle w reading & can’t follow directions, just know I might take you first." - Eric Weinstein
"never take advice from someone lower-optionality than you" - joshua vantard
"To me the differences between different great minds is not as pressing as the question of what it takes to make minds great, or keep them great as we move through time or adverse environments.
There is so much brilliance in the world; and much of it decays or is destroyed or wasted. This is the true tragedy and challenge before us." - David Holz
"'We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can't have both."
"the best way to predict the future is to create it"
"He was always asking forgiveness rather than asking permission"
- about Aaron Swartz
""In a pervasively connected world, thinking different is the source of innovation and wealth. Just being smart is not enough."
"I’ve read a lot of criticisms with directionally correct advice that still take willfully narrow spiteful views towards real people."
- H/T Danielle Fong
"Most people die at 25 and aren't buried until they're 75" - Ben Franklin
"it's said that a lecture is a method of transferring information from the professor's chalkboard to the student's notes without going through any brains in between"
- H/T Brian Bi
"50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people. "
- Sam Altman
“One of the strange things in Silicon Valley is that so many of these successful entrepreneurs suffer from a mild form of Asperger’s or something like that. And I always think of this as an incredible indictment of our society: What sort of society is it where, if you do not have Asperger’s, you will pick up on all these social cues that discourage you from pursuing creative original ideas.”
- Peter Thiel
"Again, I wasn’t exactly an autodidact, since I did get degrees; I was rather a barbell autodidact as I studied the exact minimum necessary to pass any exam, overshooting accidentally once in a while, and only getting in trouble a few times by undershooting. But I read voraciously, wholesale, initially in the humanities, later in mathematics and science, and now in history—outside a curriculum, away from the gym machine so to speak. I figured out that whatever I selected myself I could read with more depth and more breadth—there was a match to my curiosity. And I could take advantage of what people later pathologized as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) by using natural stimulation as a main driver to scholarship. The enterprise needed to be totally effortless in order to be worthwhile. The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether—when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement. The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research. It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism. Trial and error is freedom.
(I confess I still use that method at the time of this writing. Avoidance of boredom is the only worthy mode of action. Life otherwise is not worth living.)"
- Nicholas Taleb
"Don't follow a pre-existing path, and don't look to imitate your role models. There is no "next step". Extreme success is not like other kinds of success; what has worked for someone else, probably won't work for you. They are individuals with bold points of view who exploit their very particular set of unique and particular strengths. They are unconventional, and one reason they become the entrepreneurs they become is because they can't or don't or won't fit into the structures and routines of corporate life. They are dyslexic, they are autistic, they have ADD, they are square pegs in round holes, they piss people off, get into arguments, rock the boat, laugh in the face of paperwork. But they transform weaknesses in ways that create added advantage -- the strategies I mentioned earlier -- and seek partnerships with people who excel in the areas where they have no talent whatsoever. "
- Justine Musk
"We know a lot about the neuroscience of attention. When we pay attention to something as adults, we're more open to information about that thing, but the other parts of our brain get inhibited. The metaphor psychologists always use is that it's like a spotlight. It's as if what happens when you pay attention is that you shine a light on one particular part of the world, make that little part of your brain available for information processing, change what you think, and then leave all the rest of it alone.
When you look at both the physiology and the neurology of attention in babies, what you see is that instead of having this narrow focused top-down kind of attention, babies are open to all the things that are going on around them in the world. Their attention isn't driven by what they're paying attention to. It's driven by how information-rich the world is around them. When you look at their brains, instead of just, as it were, squirting a little bit of neurotransmitter on the part of their brain that they want to learn, their whole brain is soaked in those neurotransmitters.
The thing that babies are really bad at is inhibition, so we say that babies are bad at paying attention. What we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention. What we're great at as adults is not paying attention to all the distractions around us, and just paying attention to one thing at a time. Babies are really bad at that. But the result is that their consciousness is like a lantern instead of being like a spotlight."
- Alison Gopnik
“Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
- Peter Thiel
"This is a simple truth, but we’ve all been trained to ignore it. Our educational system both drives and reflects our obsession with competition. Grades themselves allow precise measurement of each student’s competitiveness; pupils with the highest marks receive status and credentials. We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences. Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior, while children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly contrived academic parallel reality.
And it gets worse as students ascend to higher levels of the tournament. Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?"
- Peter Thiel
“knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.”
"Ultra-driven people are often plagued by a deep sense of existential danger. Historians have long noticed that an astonishing percentage of the greatest writers, musicians, artists, and leaders had a parent die or abandon them while they were between the ages of nine and fifteen[...] Like so many other ambitious people, she was haunted by the knowledge that life is precarious. Unless she scrambled to secure some spot in the world, everything could be destroyed by a sudden blow."
"There's a sad story that's often told about elephants: how because they're roped to a pole from a young age, they grow to be big and strong and helpless, not realizing how much freedom they actually have. In many ways, I think humans are the same. There are many rules we're told we have to follow, and there are many people who remind us of our limits."
- Yujing Jean Fan
"You should aim to either be the first or the best"
- Inna Vishik's PhD adviser
"What is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now? And if you are not working on that, why aren't you?"
- Aaron Swartz
"I'm increasingly of the opinion that tech entrepreneurship is over-hyped as a career path. It's good for some people to do it, and it's good for society that some people do it, but there's currently too many people doing it. There are many, many other important career paths for people to take. Probably the central problem is that too many career paths are dominated by overly bureaucratized, politicized, and stagnant institutions (academia, the military, the church, the health care system, the government, Big Pharma, other big mainstream companies, etc), while doing a tech startup allows one to succeed without playing ball with these mindless behemoths. But the real solution to the problem isn't for everyone to go into tech, it's to find a way to reinvent the old institutions."
- http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jxn/entrepreneurship_and_college_attendance/#comments
"I related very much to the case studies in the book of adults and young people who graduated from school feeling worthless and empty. Though the people featured in the book felt this way because they struggled in school for various reasons (dyslexia, ADHD, exceptional creativity, etc.), I was actually on the other end of the spectrum as an overachiever. However, I found that the very habits that made me a high-achieving student (suppressing my own desires and interests, sacrificing sleep and fun for my work) actually made me a very unhappy and lost adult. I didn't have much sense of autonomy after obeying my teachers for 17 years of my life. I had little sense of self worth apart from the praise I had become addicted to from people in authority."
- http://www.amazon.com/Wounded-School-Recapturing-Learning-Standing/dp/0807749559/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385587770&sr=1-1&keywords=wounded+by+school
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” - Peter Thiel
"I think competition can make people stronger at whatever it is they’re competing on. If we’re competing in some athletic event for competitive swimmers, really intensely competing, it’s likely that both of us will become better, but it’s also quite possible we’ll lose sight of what’s truly valuable. So in competition you always end up focusing on other people, the people you’re competing with. You lose sight of the far more important question, whether what you’re doing actually makes any sense at all. "
Peter Thiel
"I don’t like the word education because it is such an extraordinary abstraction. I'm very much in favor of learning. I'm much more skeptical of credentialing or the abstract called education. So there are all these granule questions. Like, what is it that you're learning? Why are you learning it?"
Peter Thiel
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If it's original, people will think you're crazy."
"On the cognitive side, the highly creative scientist is extremely intelligent, but this intelligence is structured in a rather special way; besides possessing a cornucopia of mental elements, these elements must be profusely interconnected to optimize the effectiveness of the chance-permutation process."
Dean Simonton
"Well, I’ll tell you how it happened, because it’s such an unusual time in astronomy and most people don’t have this opportunity. But, it was Margaret Geller who said if you’re going to plan strategically, you want to be in a field that matures 10 years after you get your Ph.D., because then you’re sort of growing up with the field, and then you’re the most senior person. And so, even though now at my age, I’m basically one of the most senior people in exoplanets. And that is now. This is 10 years after my Ph.D." - Sara Seager
"I don't subscribe to the viewpoint that we can rule out unexpected results purely on theoretical grounds" - Sara Seager
"Statistical significance is little more than technical jargon. Over the
years, however, the jargon has acquired enormous—and richly undeserved—
emotional power. For additional discussion, see Freedman-Pisani-Purves
(2007, chapter 29)." - Taleb
"The trouble with Crick is not that he is incapable of independent work - on the contrary, he has much originality. The difficulty is rather than he becomes fascinated by every interesting problem that crops up in the laboratory and throws himself into the fray in an attempt to solve it. he usually makes an original and very useful contribution, but the sum total of his activities, being spread over so many different problems, tends to be different from what is required for the PhD: a single piece of consistent research which is entirely his own."
Max Perutz
"I recognize the hopelessness and the childishness, from times in my life when my future looked more uncertain. Talking about "generations" is always misleading, but it does seem like there are a lot of people in my cohort whose main characteristic is that they can't do anything and are going through a private hell because of it. It doesn't make great tragedy. It doesn't make great comedy. It's more of a montage, that rides the borderline between wistful and sickening.
And the show is great at expressing this. It's pitch-perfect. It's malaise that hasn't been made pretty.
That malaise is a big part of why I (and people in my social circles) have a recurring interest in things like motivational tools, self-education tools, changing employment paradigms, and so on. The malaise is bad. It is terrifying to be an adult who can't do anything; it is dangerous for society if we have too many such people. We want to get rid of it.
One friend of mine is teaching meditation to help people break cycles of procrastination and depression. Others are training people to fight cognitive biases. A mathematician friend has a project to reinvent self-improvement as an empirical science. A lot of people are interested in democratizing programming education, promoting entrepreneurship, creating alternatives to the credentialing bubble, and so on. We want to give people the character strengths and external resources to help them do things, because being unable to do anything is soul-destroying. We have an economy that's unforgiving of people without skills or motivation, and a social/educational environment that tends not to produce enough people with skills and motivation. And the result is incredibly sad. It needs to change. "
(from http://celandine13.livejournal.com/32703.html)
“I may look like I fit in, but I'm a born outsider. I realized this when I was 5 or 6, sitting in the back of the station wagon with a bunch of other girls on the way home from school. I looked at them and realized that I had nothing in common with these people. But it wasn't a sad thought: Because if you don't fit in, then you don't have to do normal things.”
- Sara Seager
“If you give more money to theoretical physics,” he added, “it doesn’t do any good if it just increases the number of guys following the comet head. So it’s necessary to increase the amount of variety … and the only way to do it is to implore you few guys to take a risk with your lives that you will never be heard of again, and go off in the wild blue yonder and see if you can figure it out.”
Feynman
"Our inability to predict in environments subjected to the Black Swan,
coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this state of affairs, means
that certain professionals, while be!ieving they are experts, are in fact
not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their
subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at
narrating--or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical
models. They are also more likely to wear a tie. "
Taleb
"What I see among other Chinese children whom I was raised alongside or whom I see in workplaces today is that this method of Chinese parenting is great at producing skilled and compliant knowledge workers, but it utterly fails to produce children who can achieve greatness, remake industries, or come up with disruptive innovation. All the Chinese-American people I know who now perform at the highest levels - both creatively and technically - either achieved this without being driven to it by their parents (ask Niniane Wang about her upbringing) or in rebellion against the paths their parents set out for them (see Tony Hsieh http://www.businessinsider.com/t...). The others - the skilled and compliant mediocre - make superb employees for the truly great, and if that is what their parents consider "successful," then that's exactly what they'll get."
-Yishan Wong
"inconsistent performance despite great effort. People with ADD do great one hour and lousy the next, or great one day and lousy the next, regardless of effort and time in preparation".
- Driven to Distraction
“What made me who I am now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood.” – Nicolas Sarkozy
"kids with ADD organize by stuffing book bags and closets. adults organize by putting everything into piles. The piles metastasize, soon covering most available space".
- Driven to Distraction
“I had to take a break after opening Word, as that was enough of an accomplishment for me. FML”
- Princeton FML
"If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all."
Schrodinger
"Different technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or harder to perform.
All other things being equal, things that are easier to do are more likely to be done, and things that are harder to do are less likely to be done.
All other things are never equal.
That is why technological determinism in the strict sense - if you have technology "t," you should expect social structure or relation "s" to emerge - is false. "
Benkler "Wealth of Networks"
"The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how to behave when we don't know what to do" John Holt
"Never look at humanity out of context or you'll die laughing"
Ivan Kozlov
"for such a small person you make a lot of noise"
Chantal Murthy
"I remember when I used to sleep."
zoogies
"mapleleafs2six: HSL's Unique Board Culture threatens CC's seriousness or something
mapleleafs2six: maybe it's not as respectable if you have AOMs and IKs running around"
"The trouble is that one species may outperform another in a problem-solving test not because it's smarter, but because one species is poorly suited to that particular testing situation"
" Monk, I think you're misunderstanding the issue underlying Simfish's question.. or maybe I'm over-interpreting, that's a possibility as well. When I look at the answer people have given, I don't care so much about what they are as to what they might actually reveal about how a person views society and, by extension, what degree of responsibility they're willing to accept for the failings of others."
- Angel Chris
"I often tell my students at Stanford that the most important things they will learn as students is not something that a professor will tell them, but things they learn about themselves. What motivates them, how hard they can work, and what they find satisfying."
- Douglas D. Osheroff
"Nihilism killed my superego"
Me
"Similarly, no one has been able to confirm any certain limits to the speed with which man can learn. Schools and universities have usually been organized as if to suggest that all students learn at about the same rather plodding and regular speed. But, whenever the actual rates at which different people learn have been tested, nothing has been found to justify such an organization. Not only do individuals learn at vastly different speeds and in different ways, but man seems capable of astonishing feats of rapid learning when the attendant circumstances are favorable. It seems that, in customary educational settings, one habitually uses only a tiny fraction of one's learning capacities."
Encyclopedia Britannica, Philosophy of Education
"I suspect it is a lot of RSI hype. Remember that no matter who you are, there is always some kid who nobody knows who has been sitting for 5 years ponding stuff and will emerge a genius. Always. :)"
differential
""The single best criterion for intelligence is whether someone is able to confidently predict the future, over and over, without major mistakes, and has a habit of scrupulously recording predictions and the related hits and misses. I don't just mean predictions about the financial markets. I mean...about anything you ask them about. It's okay to say, "I don't know" once in a while, but the number of answers should be greater than the I-don't-knows, no matter how many questions in how many fields are asked (leaving out time wasting things like sports and entertainment trivia).
There are few people I know who have this capability.
Once you have known someone like this for years, you're spoiled for life. Very few people seem intelligent to you again, at least in a way that is meaningfully different from most people. You can love all people, all the time, but you know that when it comes to the future, over 99% of people are guessing unless they are talking about simple deterministic systems. Being able to predict the outcome of complex nondeterministic systems? That takes uncommon intelligence.""
- Alex Lightman [it describes an awesome type of character/person, though I don't necessarily agree with his definition on intelligence]
"You're going to have an interesting life".
Julia Schwarz (to me, after an incident)
more hackneyed (but still impt/of recurring relevance) quotes:
"perfect is the enemy of the good"
“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”