nico λ

“There is an emptiness in us all that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage. That has been true since the beginning of the age of mass media, but the garbage pump got 100 times more powerful in the 2010s.”

So I’m not worried about the limits that reality places on scientific discovery. The strictest limits are inside our own minds—the questions we never ask because they seem too obvious, the explanations we accept without sufficient evidence, the studies we never run because they’re too far outside the consensus

Pythagoras, as everyone knows, said that “all things are numbers.” This statement, interpreted in a modern way, is logically nonsense, but what he meant was not exactly nonsense. He discovered the importance of numbers in music, and the connection which he established between music and arithmetic survives in the mathematical terms “ harmonic mean”

If we insist on argument as the essence of education, we will defend democracy not as the most efficient but as the most educational form of government, one that extends the circle of debate as widely as possible and thus forces all citizens to articulate their views, to put their views at risk, and to cultivate the virtues of eloquence, clarity of

Just as I have never met anyone who chose to become addicted, neither have I met anyone whose addictions did not, at their onset at least, provide for some essential human need.