Tom Steele > Tom's Quotes

“I love you like a fat kid loves cake!”
― Scott Adams

“People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented new bullshit on the spot to justify why the answer was still no. When people said, Convince me, she knew it didn’t mean they had an open mind. It meant they had power and wanted to enjoy it a minute.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“every story written is
marks upon a page
The same marks,
repeated, only
differently arranged”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“How does the human race survive past one generation? How do parents not just eat their children?”
― Dennis E. Taylor, We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

“fossil records, while appearing comprehensive, are anything but; this misconception was mainly due to the sheer mass of media coverage, films and books warping our sense of perspective. Conventional predictions indicate that a mere two per cent of all species that have ever lived will have been preserved. In many instances, millions of years go unaccounted for in terms of any kind of significant animal finds and evolutionary continuity”
― Robert Storey, Revelations

“He gave a puzzled look. ‘Doesn’t the Lord’s Prayer mention just that? “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” The answer is staring them in the face, but we’ve ensured they ignore and deride it – and no, pay no heed to the English Standard Version, we’ve already begun to corrupt God’s word in the ESV, amongst others. We don’t just try to pervert Catholics, God, no, all Christians are fair game – the fools. All religions, for that matter. We’ve had particular fun demonising Jews and Muslims, and some entire countries have been cast into madness by pornography alone. Papua, New Guinea, is a particularly pleasing example. But I digress. Did you know there’s a whole raft of trauma release therapies that work amazingly well at curing virtually all mental disorders and addictions? They can even reverse some diseases and prevent the manifestation of others. It’s not very well known, but that’s because we can’t make money out of healthy people, we need them sick and disorientated and thinking they need drugs to cure themselves, when the cure is within them all along!”
― Robert Storey, The Lost Prophet

“This world is a mirror. Whatever you do to another, you do to yourself. If you hate another, you hate a part of yourself. If you kill another, you kill a part of yourself. If you enjoy another’s pain, you enjoy your own. If you steal from another, you steal trust from yourself. If you fear something, you fear yourself”
― Robert Storey, The Lost Prophet

“Yeh, but what if they were faked? Everyone knows the moon landings never happened. What if they faked the other ones, too? We can’t believe anything they say anymore. They’d say white was black if they thought it’d keep us in line. Just look at the GMRC. How can we trust them?’ ‘He’s got a point,’ Sarah said.”
― Robert Storey, The Lost Prophet

“Vision’s mostly a lie anyway,” he continued. “We don’t really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses. Everything else is just peripheral blur, just … light and motion. Motion draws the focus. And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, Keeton? Saccades, they’re called. Blurs the image, the movement’s way too fast for the brain to integrate so your eye just … shuts down between pauses. It only grabs these isolated freeze-frames, but your brain edits out the blanks and stitches an … an illusion of continuity into your head.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“You think you’d be able to fight the strings? You think you’d even feel them? I could apply a transcranial magnet to your head right now and you’d raise your middle finger or wiggle your toes or kick Siri here in the sack and then swear on your sainted mother’s grave that you only did it because you wanted to. You’d dance like a puppet and all the time swear you were doing it of your own free will, and that’s just me,”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don’t already do to yourselves.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains—cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail. From “Wind-Wafted Wild Flowers”
Muriel Strode, 1903”
― Colin Alexander, Starman's Saga: The Long, Strange Journey of Leif The Lucky

“Divide et impera,’ Khan says. ‘Divide and conquer. The tactic of choice of dictators and tyrants. Make us so busy pointing fingers at each other that we miss the bigger game.”
― M.V. Melcer, Refractions

“The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.” --Gregory Maguire”
― Jina S. Bazzar, Shadow Walker

“Sun Tzu also said, ‘The skillful employer of men will employ the wise man, the brave man, the covetous man, and the stupid man,”
― James Rosone, Monroe Doctrine: Books 1 - 4

“You work at Alibaba, so you’re using your AI to better understand consumer behavior. Like what a consumer is looking for, what are they buying—if they buy x, then they are more likely to also buy y and z, so you can build a microtargeted ad to get a product in front of them. Right?” Hank inquired. Dan nodded. “Yes. We learned a lot of this from how Amazon built their system. For instance, when Google AdSense first came out, Amazon was the largest consumer of keyword marketing. Eventually, once Amazon had built a large enough platform, they were able to start doing that themselves. At Alibaba, we replicated that system. I suppose the only real difference between our two companies is we have access to a much larger demographic of users and consumers given China’s population.” Hank explained, “The Met want my help in creating a predictive behavior analysis program. They want me to build a program that will allow them to identify people who may be about to commit a crime. This way they can move officers to intercede or be there when it happens. One, I’m not sure it’s totally possible to create something like that, and two, I’m not sure we want to create a society where we have AIs anticipating our actions before we take them.”
― James Rosone, Monroe Doctrine: Books 1 - 4

“One thing Remington knew about her efforts in the game was that successful retail was mostly psychological. Customers were less prone to buy if they did not feel good about it.”
― Jaxon Reed, Star League Assassins Books 1-10: Complete Series Boxset

“He couldn’t help but think the Senator had been smart to place the most important items in hard-to-find places.  When the cavern was raided, the other prisoner groups would never stumble across them.”
― Tim Rangnow, Chain Reaction

“Ayn Rand, “We are fast approaching the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.”
― Eric Ebert Smith, ARGO: Book 1

“Aren’t most rules a reaction to somebody trying to pull one over on somebody else anyway?”
― J.N. Chaney, Star Scrapper

“Post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” Ned said, and Imogen and I stared at one another in confusion. He continued. “It means ‘after it, therefore because of it,’ and speaks to the mistaken assumption that just because one thing follows another in sequence, the second happened because of the first.”
― J.N. Chaney, Deadly Ghosts

“And so, as time passed, more and more people begin to trust the algorithm to find them the best people to meet, the best jobs to apply for, even who they should vote for.” Scott felt a nudge from Cyrus, followed by a whisper: “Kill me now.” But there was no stopping Padooa. “Soon, society began to change. Subtly at first, yet over time it became clear to some that things were not right, as age-old institutions began to topple, and the fragmentation and polarization of society began to take root. Yet so powerful and useful was the algorithm in people's lives that those who gave themselves over to it completely began to prosper where others would fall behind. Now came a time where those who wished to have a good future had no option but to give themselves over to the algorithm, whether they wanted to or not. They had no choice. “This was the time when the Dataists came to power—zealots and extremists who believed in the all-pervading greatness of the algorithm. They advocated that all people should submit every aspect of their lives so that the algorithm could create a more all-encompassing dataset. Those that resisted this intrusion into their lives were seen as hindrances to the advancement of society. They were shunned and they were vilified, and ultimately, they were persecuted. “So strong did the Dataists become, with their quasi-religious mindset, that they began to gain executive power in many regions of Earth. It became a crime to withhold data from the algorithm, initially punishable by fines, but soon this became incarceration and finally, death by execution. So great was their belief that the future of humanity lay with the algorithm that they could not countenance errors.”
― Gerald M. Kilby, Evolution

“Approximately a ten to fifteen percent chance of a major navigational error, resulting in a significant displacement in space and/or time. About a five percent chance of a catastrophic outcome, meaning the mech in question would be lost altogether during the passage.” Sentinel paused, then went on. “You have thirteen mechs in your squadron, Commander. If you choose to make this passage, you should expect that two or three of them will be lost—one of those permanently.”
― J.N. Chaney, Messenger Corps

“Don’t give up or in. As someone, though I don’t remember who, once said: Think of the perseverance and resilience of non-human animals in the face of unfathomable hardships. Bide your time. Avoiding ruin is paramount in game theory. Quitting the game entirely cancels all possible future upside. You must survive.”
― Tom B. Night, Circadian Algorithms

“I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.”
― Franz Kafka

“It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“Paths are made by walking”
― Franz Kafka