Sublime

And Sukarno was not surprised—he had known all along that Adams would do a far better job with his memoirs than any “serious” journalist.

his book The Folly of Fools, Trivers argues that a contradiction lies at the heart of human intelligence. Our brains are simultaneously designed to seek out information and destroy that information after we acquire it. Specifically, our minds evolved to make sense of the world not in ways that are true, but in ways that help us survive. But once al

“The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.”

impression management,

Stephen Palmer, a professor of psychology at the University of California who directs the Visual Perception and Aesthetics Lab,

Don’t automatically accept what you are told.

Almost everyone who isn’t a Pleistocene archaeologist – that is, who is not forced to confront the evidence – simply ignores it and carries on exactly as they had before, writing as if hunter-gatherers can be assumed to have lived in a state of primordial innocence. As Christopher Boehm puts it, we seem doomed to play out an endless recycling of th

Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers. —John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture”

seeing is not a passive process of receiving data; it’s an active process of prediction and correction.