Debbie Foster

It is through seeing the invisible, hearing the inaudible, and feeling the untouchable that humans imagine, predict, and infer. The problem is that humans have weak imaginations, inaccurate predictions, and fallacious reasoning. That’s why humans repeat the same mistakes, get easily excited, are deceived by absurd fictions, and fight over pointless

I learned that it takes a special kind of vision to truly appreciate what it means to exist.

There is nothing more beautiful than a formal system with axioms that are perfectly internally consistent. Such systems can be right, and they can be wrong, but that is beside the point. The beauty is that there is no room for bias or prejudice, no tolerance for interference.

The picture, in the end, is of an odd species that stumbled into global dominance through a relatively quick succession of simple mistakes. A species forced to speak up, or let its helpless infants perish.

We are the result of a short series of discrete mistakes that made us what we are today. Our descent from other apes in the last few million years or so boils down to a mere handful of genetic and morphological turning points. These small changes incrementally built on each other, as in a multiplayer game in which the outcome is never quite

I will argue here that talking and caring for underbaked newborns co-evolved, in an episode of runaway selection initiated by the genetic anomalies we now know spurred our species' neurological growth.

Innocence is an illusion. We come into this world a bundle of disordered drives and desires, some good, some not. We are neither pure nor impure, we are only somewhat educable. There is an art to transforming raw youths into decent mature adults, and its tools are experience and knowledge. Some of it is pleasant, some less so. And for every gain in

…we are simultaneously confused about how to carry out our responsibilities to children and about what it means to be an adult. We seem to have settled instead on keeping everyone in the perpetual limbo of adolescence, rushing children into a state they are unprepared for, and allowing adults to remain there as long as they would like. Peter Pan

Dostoyevsky understood this psychological state better than anyone. In so many of his novels we meet seemingly wicked characters who are really only in despair, their original goodness having been robbed by someone or by circumstances beyond their control. And to cope with the trauma, they convince themselves that there is no such thing as