Tom Phillips > Quotes

“Evolution gets results not by planning ahead, but rather by simply hurling a ridiculously large number of hungry, horny organisms at a dangerous and unforgiving world and seeing who fails least.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“We tend to assume that when something awful happens there must have been some great controlling intelligence behind it. It’s understandable: how could things have gone so wrong, we think, if there wasn’t an evil genius pulling the strings? The downside of this is that we tend to assume that if we can’t immediately spot an evil genius, then we can all chill out a bit because everything will be fine. But history suggests that’s a mistake, and it’s one that we make over and over again. Many of the worst man-made events that ever occurred were not the product of evil geniuses. Instead they were the product of a parade of idiots and lunatics, incoherently flailing their way through events, helped along the way by overconfident people who thought they could control them.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“Our minds are capable of imagining concertos and cities and the theory of relativity into existence, and yet apparently incapable of deciding which type of crisps we want to buy at the shop without five minutes’ painful deliberation.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“More people were killed by lawnmowers than by terrorism in the USA in the decade between 2007 and 2017, but at the time of writing, the US government has yet to launch a War on Lawnmowers. (Although, let’s be honest, given recent events you wouldn’t rule it out.)”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“Humans see patterns in the world, we can communicate this to other humans, and we have the capacity to imagine futures that don’t yet exist: how if we just changed this thing, then that thing would happen, and the world would be a slightly better place. The only trouble is … well, we’re not terribly good at any of those things. Any honest assessment of humanity’s previous performance on those fronts reads like a particularly brutal annual review from a boss who hates you. We imagine patterns where they don’t exist. Our communication skills are, uh, sometimes lacking. And we have an extraordinarily poor track record of failing to realise that changing this thing will also lead to the other thing, and that even worse thing, and oh God no now this thing is happening how do we stop it.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“Ténéré Tree Famously the most isolated tree on the planet, alone in the middle of the Sahara Desert – until 1973, when despite it being the only tree for 250 miles, a drunk driver still managed to drive his truck into it.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“The number of things that we know for certain is pretty tiny compared to the number of things that we know we don't know. The number of things that we don't even know we don't know is probably far bigger still, but unfortunately we don't know for sure.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“If instead of having wars, we just sent large groups of people to each other’s countries to drink loads of their wine and aimlessly wander around their towns on a regular basis, then the world would probably be a much, much happier place. Although now I’ve written that, it occurs to me that’s essentially what the EU is.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“That man-made climate change is real, and potentially an existential threat to many communities around the world and many aspects of civilisation, is so well established as a scientific fact by this point that it seems kind of dull to run over the evidence again.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“Confirmation bias is our annoying habit of zeroing in like a laser-guided missile on any scrap of evidence that supports what we already believe, and blithely ignoring the possibly much, much larger piles of evidence that suggest we might have been completely misguided.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“Congress was forced to take action, passing the Clean Water Act in 1972. Gradually the state of America’s waterways improved, to the point where they now hardly ever catch fire. In a rare example of a happy ending in this book, people actually did what they needed to do to make things better, and hahaha, there’s absolutely no chance that the Trump administration would ever attempt to overturn clean water standards because they’re worried industries aren’t allowed to pollute rivers enough. [Puts finger to ear.] Oh, I’m being told that’s exactly what they’ve done.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“Even if popular culture has long enjoyed turning him into an object of mockery, we still tend to believe that the Nazi machine was ruthlessly efficient, and that the great dictator spent most of his time...well, dictating things. So it’s worth remembering that Hitler was actually an incompetent, lazy egomaniac and his government was an absolute clown show. In fact, this may even have helped his rise to power, as he was consistently underestimated by the German elite. Before he became chancellor, many of his opponents had dismissed him as a joke for his crude speeches and tacky rallies. He was a “pathetic dunderhead” according to one magazine editor; another wrote that his party was a “society of incompetents” and that people should not “overestimate the fairground party.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“It’s often said that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on.”
― Tom Phillips, Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullsh*t

“groupthink – when the dominant idea in a group overwhelms all the others, dissent being dismissed or never voiced thanks to the social pressure to not be the one saying, ‘Uh, I’m not sure this is the greatest idea?”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“This is a book about humans, and our remarkable capacity for fucking things up. About why for every accomplishment that makes you proud to be human (art, science, tacos), there’s always something else that makes you shake your head in bafflement and despair (war, pollution, Taco Bell).”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“The reason science has a fairly decent track record is that (in theory, at least) it starts from the sensible, self-deprecating assumption that most of our guesses about how the world works will be wrong. Science tries to edge its way in the general direction of being right, but it does that through a slow process of becoming progressively a bit less wrong. The way it's supposed to work is this: you have an idea about how the world might work, and in order to see if there's a chance it might be right, you try very hard to prove yourself wrong. If you fail to prove yourself wrong, you try to prove yourself wrong again, or prove yourself wrong another way. After a while you decide to tell the world that you've failed to prove yourself wrong, at which point everybody else tries to prove you wrong, as well. If they all fail to prove you wrong, then slowly people begin to accept that you might possibly be right, or at least less wrong than the alternatives.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“thought to yourself: Oh, shit, what have we done?”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“with Venice. One lucky Venetian shot later – no more Parthenon. Temple of Artemis One of the actual Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, until 356 bce, when a bloke called Herostratus burned it down because he wanted attention. Boeung Kak lake The largest and most beautiful lake in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, until it was decided to pump it full of sand to build luxury apartments on it. Now a puddle. Buddhas of Bamiyan The magnificent statues of Gautam”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“research shows that we wildly overestimate our own competence.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“There’s a thing called ‘choice-supportive bias’, which basically means that once we’ve committed to a course of action, we cling onto the idea that it was the right choice like a drowning sailor clinging to a plank.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“Availability, meanwhile, means that you make judgement calls on the basis of whatever information comes to mind easiest, rather than deeply considering all the possible information that might be available to you. And that means we're hugely biased towards basing our world view on stuff that's happened most recently, or things that are particularly dramatic and memorable, while all the old, mundane stuff that's probably a more accurate representation of everyday reality just sort of …fades away.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“While it's possible that this happened because an enterprising hunter-gatherer ancestor of ours woke up one day and said 'I am going to make friends with a wolf and he will be a Very Good Boy,' it's more likely that dogs were (at the start, at least) basically self-domesticating.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“7 AMAZING SIGHTS YOU’LL NEVER SEE, BECAUSE HUMANS RUINED THEM The Parthenon One of the jewels of Ancient Greece, until in 1687 the Ottomans used it as a gunpowder store during a war”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“Niektórzy z nas mają kłopot z porannym wybieraniem skarpet - wyobraz sobie, że naprawdę chcesz decydować, jakie skarpety powinien nosić cały naród.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“In a list of ‘moves designed to piss lots of people off’, banning coffee in Turkey probably ranks somewhere alongside banning cheese in France, banning guns in America and … well, banning national stereotyping in Britain.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“domestication”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“El suyo era un proceso de toma de decisiones basado a partes iguales en la arrogancia, en un optimismo sin fundamento y en esconder la cabeza en la arena.”
― Tom Phillips, Humanos: Una breve historia de cómo la hemos pifiado (Contextos)

“Tendemos a asumir que, cuando pasa algo terrible, detrás ha de haber una gran inteligencia controlándolo. Es comprensible: ¿cómo pudo salir todo tan mal —pensamos— sin que hubiera un genio maléfico tirando de los hilos? El inconveniente que esto tiene es que también tendemos a asumir que mientras no identifiquemos al instante a un genio maléfico podemos relajarnos un poco, porque todo irá bien .
Pero la historia sugiere que eso es un error, un error en el que incurrimos una y otra vez. Muchos de los peores sucesos producidos por la mano del hombre que hayan ocurrido jamás no fueron obra de genios maléficos. Fueron, antes bien, atribuibles a un desfile de idiotas y lunáticos que reaccionaban incoherentemente al discurrir de los acontecimientos, con la ayuda de gente excesivamente confiada que pensaba que podía controlarlos.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

“To this day, the story of Darien is one that divides Scotland. During the 2014 referendum on independence, it became a metaphor for both sides. For the nationalists, a parable of how England had always sought to sabotage and oppress Scottish hopes; for the unionists, a lesson in the dangers of abandoning stability in favour of unrealistic ambitions. As a tale, it lends itself to metaphor. I mean, it’s the story of a country turning away from a political union with its closest geographical trading partners in favour of a fantasy vision of unfettered global influence promoted by free-trade zealots with dreams of empire, who wrapped their vague plans in the rhetoric of aggrieved patriotism while consistently ignoring expert warnings about the practical reality of the situation. Unfortunately, I can’t think of anything that could be a metaphor for right now.”
― Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up