Michael Schaffner
@mas
Michael Schaffner
Evolution vs Progress vs Reform
(Chesterton, Orthodoxy)
“Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes.”
Laurene Powell Jobs • Make Something Wonderful
Whether there is a long-run direction in evolution, and whether that direction is to be considered progress are of course two different questions.
Herbert A. Simon • The Sciences of the Artificial
“If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.”
Bibliography for Beginners - Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill
For the meaning of woods is the combination of energy with complexity. A forest is not in the least rude or barbarous; it is only dense with delicacy.
G. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]
Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value. We should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins. Our obsession with certainty has another side effect. It distorts our vision through a set of funhouse mirrors called unknown knowns.
Ozan Varol • Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
when we face uncertainty, we should be open to the quixotic and the unconventional.
Emergence Magazine • Navigating the Mysteries
For progress by its very name indicates a direction; and the moment we are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same degree doubtful about the progress.
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton • Heretics
‘Anyone,’ said the other, ‘except the Fools at the Top could of course have foreseen it from the word go.’
C. S. Lewis • The Dark Tower: And Other Stories
He has that real disadvantage which has arisen out of the modern worship of progress and novelty; and he thinks anything odd and new must be an advance.