Irreverence is another person’s disrespect to your god; there isn’t any word that tells what your disrespect to his god is.
—Mark Twain
Tag Archives: Published Elsewhere
On Censorship and Authoritarianism
Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too.
— Salman Rushdie
On Debating Generously
You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
— Daniel Dennett, sharing Anatol Rapoport’s rules of constructive argument and debate (via Nagesh Belludi)
On The Whole Point of Software
Using technology to ease the burden on the user is… kind of the whole point of creating software!
On Knowing One Has What One Wants
Why would I go and say bye-bye to Miami in the winter, bye-bye to Saint-Tropez in the summer and bye-bye to spring and fall in New York? I have a perfect life.
On the Global Perpective Inspired by Spaceflight
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’
— Edgar D. Mitchell, astronaut
On Carrie Fischer’s Princess Leia
Even though her character was very young and mostly wore white, she wasn’t remotely virginal, her tone of voice was the auditory equivalent of an eye roll, and she never hesitated to inform Darth Vader that he was wretched and vile, and to tell his henchmen that they stank to high heaven.
On the Obligation to Speak Out
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.
On Interesting Cities
And though “youth-driven food boom” may sound frivolous, it is anything but. Restaurants and cafes are a big part of the personality of a city. Imagine walking down a street in Paris. What are you walking past? Little restaurants and cafes. Imagine driving through some depressing random exurb. What are you driving past? Starbucks and McDonalds and Pizza Hut. As Gertrude Stein said, there is no there there. You could be anywhere.
These independent restaurants and cafes are not just feeding people. They’re making there be a there here.
— Paul Graham in his essay “How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub”
On the Catholic Church’s Credibility on Birth Control
Most Catholics realize that the Vatican is led by old celibate men who know little about families or women.
— Former nun Mary Johnson, as quoted by Valerie Tarico
On Not Voting Only Based on Candidate Gender
I don’t vote with my vagina.
On the Essential Challenges of Technology and Software Development
We’re not working in an ideal world here — we’re making standards for them to be applied in the real world. So we’re not going to look at something that would revolutionize the keyboard completely. We want something that’s usable, something that’s economically feasible. We want it to work.
— Philippe Magnabosco, project manager seeking to improve French-language computer keyboards, as quoted on The Verge
On Leadership
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 (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.