WIST Quotations

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, Introduction (2010)

Dave — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 18:41:56 +0000

We humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, Introduction (2010)
(Source)

Bear, Elizabeth -- Ancestral Night (2019)

Dave — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 21:18:27 +0000

Impatience and cutting corners: it’s the primate way. It got us down out of the trees and up to the top of the evolutionary heap as a species, which is a lot more like a slippery, mud-slick game of King of the Hill with stabbing encouraged than any kind of tidy Victorian great chain of being or ladder of creation.

Elizabeth Bear (b. 1971) American author [pseud. for Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky]
Ancestral Night (2019)
(Source)

Richardson, James -- Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays, # 1 (2001)

Dave — Fri, 14 Aug 2015 13:19:25 +0000

The road reaches every place, the short cut only one.

James Richardson (b. 1950) American poet
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays, # 1 (2001)

Toffler, Alvin -- Future Shock, ch. 16 (1970)

Dave — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:21:35 +0000

Unless we can extensively program our behavior, we waste tremendous amounts of information-processing capacity on trivia. This is why we form habits. Watch a committee break for lunch and then return to the same room: almost invariably its members seek out the same seats they occupied earlier. … Choosing the same seat spares us the need to survey and evaluate other possibilities.

Alvin Toffler (1928-2016) American writer and futurist
Future Shock, ch. 16 (1970)