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 b

Jim Simons: "I’m not an extremely fast thinker myself; I just work hard."

That was all I needed to do—work hard, not fast. A paper I published in '68 took me five years. But it has had 1,850 citations. For a math paper, that’s an awful lot.

There’s too much emphasis on a person’s being able to answer questions quickly."

The way to greater confidence is not to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it’s to come to peace with our inevitable ridiculousness

— Alain de Botton in ‘On Confidence’

The antidote to envy is one's own work. Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it… [T]he work itself. It drives the spooks away.

-Bonnie Friedman

AI is aggregated human intelligence. So it’s better to call it collective intelligence than artificial intelligence.

Emphasizing the collectivity (something built on the commons) over the artificiality (a feat of technology) gives us an entire new way to see, perceive and relate to the technology.

-via Holly Herndon, in conversation with Ezra Klein