Quips and Quotes

For slight

Non-Ergodic : When group probabilities don’t apply to singular events. If 100 people play Russian Roulette once, the odds of dying might be, say, 10%. But if one person plays Russian Roulette 100 times, the odds are dying are practically 100%.

Morgan Housel • 100 Little Ideas

Buridan’s Ass : A thirsty donkey is placed exactly midway between two pails of water. It dies because it can’t make a rational decision about which one to choose. A form of decision paralysis.

Morgan Housel • 100 Little Ideas

Three Men Make a Tiger: People will believe anything if enough people tell them it’s true. It comes from a Chinese proverb that if one person tells you there’s a tiger roaming around your neighborhood, you can assume they’re lying. If two people tell you, you begin to wonder. If three say it’s true, you’re convinced there’s a tiger in your... See more

Morgan Housel • 100 Little Ideas

“Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false.”

Ted Chiang • Exhalation: Stories

Conversation at MIT in 1953:

Marvin Minsky, "We're going to make machines intelligent. We are going to make them conscious!"

Doug Engelbart replied, "You're going to do all that for the machines? What are you going to do for the people?"

“Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”

―

John Berger

A quote by John Berger

We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment.

M. E. Rothwell • All Hail the Cloud

There’s a great line in Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize-winning novel Prophet Song: “The end of the world is a local event.”