An army of donkeys led by a lion will defeat an army of lions led by a donkey.
— Mongol saying
On the Danger of Strong AI
Nick Bostrom worries that creating something smarter than you is a basic Darwinian error, and compares the excitement about it to sparrows in a nest deciding to adopt a baby owl so it’ll help them and protect them once it grows up—while ignoring the urgent cries from a few sparrows who wonder if that’s necessarily a good idea
On Sacrificing for the Arts
Charles Dickens, rejecting an invitation from a friend:
“It is only half an hour’ — ‘It is only an afternoon’ — ‘It is only an evening,’ people say to me over and over again; but they don’t know that it is impossible to command one’s self sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes — or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometime worry a whole day … Who ever is devoted to an art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it. I am grieved if you suspect me of not wanting to see you, but I can’t help it; I must go in my way whether or no.
via “Creative People Say No”
On Free Expression
It’s a truism of free expression that if you only defend speech you agree with, you don’t believe in free expression. That doesn’t mean you have to defend the content of the expression: it means you have to support the right of people to say stupid, awful things. You can and should criticize the stupid, awful things. It’s the distinction between the right to express a stupid idea, and the stupidity of the idea itself.
On the God of the Gaps
Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.
— Hippocrates (as quoted by Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World)
On Lazy Journalism
Not so much Pulitzer prize for journalism as Wurlitzer prize for churnalism.
— Steven Millward for TechInAsia, calling out journalists who don’t bother with basic fact-checking even on the most unbelievable stories, thanks to the rush for eyeballs.
On Silicon Valley, Engineered Addictions, Big Data, and A/B Tests
The Internet is no longer a technology. The Internet is a psychology experiment.
On CSS
CSS got it wrong and we’re now suffering the consequences. The HTML feature that was ignored in CSS 1 was the thing they should’ve focused on: tables, which were directives that generated layout. It set us on a path of trying to fake them by piggybacking on supposedly semantic elements, like lipstick on a div.
On Rising Income Disparity
People are angry that in the game of musical chairs that is the U.S. economy, there are less seats at the table when the music stops. And at every recession, the music is stopping.
On Hiring People Exactly Like Yourself
If spam filters sorted messages the way Silicon Valley sorts people, you’d only get email from your college roommate.
On the Limitations of Photography
I mean, photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops—for a split second.
— David Hockney, artist, videographer, and sometime-photographer
On the (Potential) Permanence of Internet Posts
Trying to get dirty pictures off the Internet is like trying to get pee out of a swimming pool.
— NewsRadio
You’re out there in a world where if you do make a mistake, it echoes in a digital canyon forever.
On Life, Art, and Sex
There was no great truth about the human condition that I would discover through celibacy.
On diligence and democracy
On Living Through a Computer
“I have certainly spent more time looking into my computer screen than at my own face; each busted pixel is like a freckle to me.”
— Eric Dern
On Context as Art
The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen, if recognized.
— Charles Simic in Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell as quoted by Tufte in Visual Explanations
On the Limits of Human Understanding
The forceps of our minds are clumsy things and crush the truth a little in the course of holding it.
— H. G. Wells
On the Difficulty of Writing
Writing is a mentally difficult thing — it’s hard to know when something’s worth saying; it’s hard to be clear; it’s hard to arrange things in a way that will hold a reader’s attention; it’s hard to sound good; it’s even hard to know whether, when you change something, you’re making it better.
On Popped Collars
e.a. nakashima as quoted by Rachel Myers:
It’s like even though I went to prep school, I’m still gangster.
On Hansel and Gretel
… basically it’s a story about how unpleasant it is to be lost.
— Steve Krug, summarizing Hansel and Gretel
On drinking streaks
Quoth your insufficiently humble editor:
It’s like someone suggested “a hair of the dog,” and you replied, “Fuck that, we’ll take the whole dog again.”
On secrets
A secret is something you can only tell one person … at a time.
— Allen Ginsberg
On directness
George Orwell:
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
On Nobility
Ernest Hemingway:
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
On Residents of The Castro
Drew Hoolhorst describes the type of person you might find living in San Francisco’s famously gay Castro neighborhood:
Tons of “not Republicans.”
Well fucking said, Drew.