Chris > Chris's Quotes

“(On one estimate, the adult human brain stores about one billion bits—a couple of orders of magnitude less than a low-end smartphone.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“You never know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.”
― Carol J. Loomis, Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2013

“Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development—and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“A sister they had, Galadriel, most beautiful of all the house of Finwë; her hair was lit with gold as though it had caught in a mesh the radiance of Laurelin.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“It is said that the skill of the Dwarves is in their hands rather than in their tongues, yet that is not true of Gimli. For none have ever made to me a request so bold and yet so courteous...I do not foretell, for all foretelling is now vain: on the one hand lies darkness, and on the other only hope. But if hope should not fail, then I say to you, Gimli son of Glóin, that your hands shall flow with gold, and yet over you gold shall have no dominion.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“For we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.”
― George Washington Carver

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”
― Peter Thiel

“The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Would that, like the smoke of the watch-fires that mounts and vanishes at random in the empty sky, the smouldering flame of passion could burn itself away”
― Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

“There is much to be said for cherry blossoms, but they seem so flighty. They are so quick to run off and leave you. And then just when your regrets are the strongest the wisteria comes into bloom, and it blooms on into the summer. There is nothing quite like it. Even the color is somehow companionable and inviting.”
― Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

“New grass, you don't even know where to sprout and grow.
How can I, a drop of dew, vanish away in the air leaving you alone?”
― Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“A Who's Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones - we had better know something about their nature and their power.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effects and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard. Even research men suffer from the handicap of inadequate methods of detecting the beginnings of injury. The lack of sufficiently delicate methods to detect injury before symptoms appear is one of the great unsolved problems in medicine.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“Carson’s thesis that we were subjecting ourselves to slow poisoning by the misuse of chemical pesticides that polluted the environment may seem like common currency now, but in 1962 Silent Spring contained the kernel of social revolution.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“In Battuta's obsession with sharia and the Muslim world and in his lack of interest in nearly everything outside it we clearly see the double-edged sword of Islam so visible in today's world: an ecumenical but self-satisfied faith capable of uniting far-flung peoples under one system of belief and one regime of law, but also severely limited in its capacity to examine and borrow from others.”
― William J Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“Athens, while remaining nominally independent, no longer commanded its lifelines or its fate. Just as it had invented many Western institutions and intellectual and artistic endeavors, so did it pioneer a less glorious tradition. In the centuries following the Peloponnesian war, Athens became the first in a long line of senescent Western empires to suffer the ignominious transformation from world power to open-air theme park, famous only for its arts, its architecture, its schools, and its past.”
― William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“Although the modern image of the imperial city is dominated by the ruins of the Coliseum and the Forum, the economic life of ancient Rome centered on side streets filled with apartments, shops, and horrea.”
― William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“The Stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca is said to have owned five hundred tripod tables with ivory legs—no small irony, since he was a vocal critic of the empire's extravagances.”
― William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“Although the Romans knew Chinese silk, they knew not China. They believed that silk grew directly on the mulberry tree, not realizing that the leaves were merely the worm's home and its food.”
― William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“In one of history's most bizarre chains of causation, the brutal, efficient newcomers were driven by a hunger for, of all things, culinary ingredients that today lie largely unused in most Western kitchens.”
― William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

“When we see the Earth from space, we see ourselves as a whole. We see the unity, and not the divisions. It is such a simple image with a compelling message; one planet, one human race.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“The human race does not have a very good record of intelligent behaviour.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“No matter how powerful a computer you have, if you put lousy data in you will get lousy predictions out.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“As a father, I would try to instill the importance of asking questions, always.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“So Hamlet was quite right. We could be bounded in a nutshell and count ourselves kings of infinite space.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“In short, the advent of super-intelligent AI would be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours we’re in trouble.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions