Timothy Ferris

[from 'The Wrong Stuff' in The New Yorker's Talk of the Town section, April 14, 1997]

[The Heaven's Gate mass suicide is] an object lesson in the hazards of living a life innocent of empirical rigor.... [It] might have been averted had just one of the observers declared, "Gee, the evidence fails to support our belief. Maybe the belief is wrong."...

Tens of millions of people have perished at the hands of leaders who were unwilling to alter their presumptions according to objective evidence....

Science ... remains a minority habit of mind... Blind belief rules the millennial universe.

Neal Stephenson

[Said by a character in Stephenson's novel  Fall, or Dodge in Hell]

The ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible ... ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution ... stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along.

Gary Kasparov

[on Twitter, Dec. 13, 2016  https://twitter.com/kasparov63/status/808750564284702720]

The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

Gore Vidal

There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

Adlai Stevenson

[ https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Adlai_Stevenson_II ]

During one of his presidential campaigns, a woman says, "Governor, you have the vote of every thinking person!"

Stevenson replies, "That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!"

Tim Gowers

[https://gowers.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/is-massively-collaborative-mathematics-possible/
(Seen cited in the Introduction of Tom Malone's book Superminds)]

[Why collaborate?]

(i) Sometimes luck is needed to have the idea that solves a problem. If lots of people think about a problem, then just on probabilistic grounds there is more chance that one of them will have that bit of luck.

(ii) ... different people know different things, so the knowledge that a large group can bring to bear on a problem is significantly greater than the knowledge that one or two individuals will have....

(iii) Different people have different characteristics when it comes to research. Some like to throw out ideas, others to criticize them, others to work out details, others to re-explain ideas in a different language, others to formulate different but related problems, others to step back from a big muddle of ideas and fashion some more coherent picture out of them, and so on....

Cory Doctorow / Thomas Piketty

[Cory Doctorow in a review of Piketty's Capital and Ideology
https://boingboing.net/2019/09/15/brahmin-left-merchant-right.html]

[Piketty notes that] elections are increasingly won by "none of the above" (that is, the decisive factor isn't who voters vote for, it's which voters don't vote at all).

Michael Shermer

We humans have a strong tendency to overidentify patterns and causation, and often erroneously locate meaningful patterns in meaningless 'noise' and overattribute agency (conscious intentional action) to inanimate objects and to random natural events.

Tim Wu

[From The Curse of Bigness (2018)]

Extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering, feeding an appetite for nationalistic and extremist leadership....

If we learned one thing from the Gilded Age, it should have been this: The road to fascism and dictatorship is paved with failures of economic policy to serve the needs of the general public.

Molly Ivins

['Reindeer are Counted Better Than Homeless', Dec. 22, 1992 (included in Nothin' but Good Times Ahead)]

Wouldn't you think some sociologist would have done a comparative study by now to prove, as I have always suspected, that there is a higher proportion of Undeserving Rich than Undeserving Poor?