Daniel Jones

“Most often, couples who get together after months or years of online infatuation enact a twenty-first-century version of Icarus flying too close to the sun with his waxen wings: the real-life exposure quickly melts the fiber-optic cable that was holding the couple aloft, and they plummet into the sea, where they tend to flail about for a while, trying to rescue their former magic.”
― Daniel Jones, Love Illuminated: Exploring Life's Most Mystifying Subject

“This is our recurring temptation—to live within our camp’s caves, taking turns both as the shadow-puppeteers and the audience. We chant our camp’s mantras repeatedly so they continue reverberating in our skulls. When we stay entrenched within our belief-camps, we create the illusion of secure reality by reinforcing each other’s presuppositions and paradigms. We choose specific watering holes of information and evidence, and we influence each other in interpreting that data in accordance with the conclusions we desire. Our camps reinforce our existing cognitive biases, making cheating all the more common and easy.”
― Daniel Jones, Shadow Gods