qvotes

The invisible hand isn’t invisible because it’s magical; it’s invisible because we’re not supposed to see whose hand it actually is.

We Cannot Talk About AI Without Talking About Capitalism, Fascism, and Liberty - Christopher Butler

Life is a physical process that gives rise to systems that are statistically unlikely to assemble and persist (by themselves)

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Kurt Vonnegut, talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:

“Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of

But as I replaced contempt with curiosity, I came to see it simply as a coping mechanism for the difficulty of living with all this uncertainty, the difficulty of being so opaque to ourselves — a language for interpreting our intentions and experiences, the way the primary purpose of prayer is to clarify our hopes and fears.

An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days

on tarot

Somebody once said that a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

Zach Kram • ‘The Three-Body Problem’ Is Brilliant. ‘3 Body Problem’ Is Better.

Only dead fish go with the flow.

-David Ogilvy

David Lynch on the limitations of language: “Cinema is a language. It can say things—big, abstract things. And I love that about it. I’m not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things,... See more

I know no greater catalyst of creativity — in art or in life — than constraint. It is the boundaries, chosen or imposed, that give shape to our lives; it is within them that we become truly creative about the kind of life we want to live. Without the constraint of bones, there would be no wings.