Kat B > Kat's Quotes

“Whatever your identity, background, or political ideology, you will be happier, healthier, stronger, and more likely to succeed in pursuing your own goals if you do the opposite of what Misoponos advised. That means seeking out challenges (rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that “feels unsafe”), freeing yourself from cognitive distortions (rather than always trusting your initial feelings), and taking a generous view of other people, and looking for nuance (rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality).”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Some very common foods and drinks are aversive. Few people enjoy, at first, coffee, beer, tobacco, or chili pepper. Pleasure from pain is uniquely human. No other animal willingly eats such foods when there are alternatives. Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans—language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

“Argue as if you're right, but listen as if you're wrong (and be willing to change your mind). Make the most respectful interpretation of the other person's perspective. Acknowledge where you agree with your critics and what you've learned from them.”
― Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

“A majority of people in these surveys also said that America gives too much aid--but when they were asked how much America should give, the median answers ranged from 5 percent to 10 percent of government spending. In other words, people wanted foreign aid 'cut' to an amount five to ten times greater than the United States actually gives!”
― Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty

“there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.”
― Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“It might feel, at least to some of us, that our opinions about issues such as abortion and the death penalty are the products of careful deliberation and that our specific moral acts, such as deciding to give to charity or visit a friend in the hospital—or for that matter, deciding to shoplift or shout a racist insult out
of a car window—are grounded in conscious decision-making. But this is said to be mistaken. As Jonathan Haidt argues, we are not judges; we are lawyers, making up explanations after the deeds have been done. Reason is impotent. "We celebrate rationality," agrees de Waal, "but when push comes to shove we assign it little weight.”
― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

“There’s an old saying: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“But efforts to protect kids from risk by preventing them from gaining experience— such as walking to school, climbing a tree, or using sharp scissors— are different. Such protections come with costs, as kids miss out on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment.”
― Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“xiii]”
― Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty

“Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.”
― Jonathan Haidt

“It's easy to be a philosopher and say true things about the rights of animals. It's much harder to get your hands dirty and do the right things at the right time truly to make a difference. That's the art of high-impact advocacy.”
― Tobias Leenaert, How to Create a Vegan World: A Pragmatic Approach

“Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.”
― Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: Why we like what we like

“There’s a lesson in real-life stalking cases that young women can benefit from learning: persistence only proves persistence—it does not prove love. The fact that a romantic pursuer is relentless doesn’t mean you are special—it means he is troubled.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“The revolution is not a question of virtue, but of effectiveness.”
― Tobias Leenaert, How to Create a Vegan World: A Pragmatic Approach

“Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”
― David Sloan Wilson Edward O. Wilson

“the egalitarian lifestyles of hunter-gatherers exist because the individuals care a lot about status. Individuals in these societies end up roughly equal because everyone is struggling to ensure that nobody gets too much power over him or her. This is invisible-hand egalitarianism.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil

“To the contemporary feminist, sexual differences mean inequality, inequality means injustice, and injustice must be stamped out at all costs. And so, they have set about stamping out sexual differences at all costs.”
― Eric Robert Morse, The Economic Theory of Sex: Industrialism, Feminism, and the Disintegration of the Family

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
― E.B. White

“If veganizing the world depends on each one of us choosing altruism over self-interest, then for the foreseeable future the world will be, at best, only partially vegan.”
― Tobias Leenaert, How to Create a Vegan World: A Pragmatic Approach

“If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it.”
― Robert Wright

“Aways remember: You’re going to die soon enough anyway; even if it’s a hundred years from now, that’s still the blink of a cosmic eye. In the meantime, live like a scientist—even a controversial one with only an ally or two in all the world—and treat life as a grand experiment, blood, sweat, tears and all. Bear in mind that there's no such thing as a failed experiment—only data.”
― Jesse Bering

“intuition is always right in at least two important ways;
It is always in response to something.
it always has your best interest at heart”
― Gavin De Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“No” is a word that must never be negotiated, because the person who chooses not to hear it is trying to control you.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“The unsolicited promise is one of the most reliable signals because it is nearly always of questionable motive.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“I am capable of what every other human is capable of. This is one of the great lessons of war and life.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“For some parents, as with Jason’s father, the least popular feature of their children is defiance. Yet it is one of the most important for safety. If defiance is always met with discipline and never with discussion, that can handicap a child. The moment the two-year-old defiantly asserts his will for the first time may be cause for celebration, not castigation, for he is building the courage to resist. If your teenage daughter never tests her defiance on you, she may well be unable to use it on a predator.”
― de Becker, Gavin, Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe

“Ginger is not distracted by the way things could be, used to be, or should be. She perceives only what is. Our reliance on the intuition of a dog is often a way to find permission to have an opinion we might otherwise be forced to call (God forbid) unsubstantiated.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“In adopting a patently false but stubbornly clung-to mythology of human sexuality that makes demons out of natural drives, we've entered a stage of moral sickness, not of moral health.”
― Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb