Acceleration Quotes

“The realms of dating, marriage, and sex are all marketplaces, and we are the products. Some may bristle at the idea of people as products on a marketplace, but this is an incredibly prevalent dynamic. Consider the labor marketplace, where people are also the product. Just as in the labor marketplace, one party makes an offer to another, and based on the terms of this offer, the other person can choose to accept it or walk. What makes the dating market so interesting is that the products we are marketing, selling, buying, and exchanging are essentially our identities and lives.

As with all marketplaces, every item in stock has a value, and that value is determined by its desirability. However, the desirability of a product isn’t a fixed thing—the desirability of umbrellas increases in areas where it is currently raining while the desirability of a specific drug may increase to a specific individual if it can cure an illness their child has, even if its wider desirability on the market has not changed.

In the world of dating, the two types of desirability we care about most are:
- Aggregate Desirability: What the average demand within an open marketplace would be for a relationship with a particular person.
- Individual Desirability: What the desirability of a relationship with an individual is from the perspective of a specific other individual.

Imagine you are at a fish market and deciding whether or not to buy a specific fish:
- Aggregate desirability = The fish’s market price that day
- Individual desirability = What you are willing to pay for the fish

Aggregate desirability is something our society enthusiastically emphasizes, with concepts like “leagues.” Whether these are revealed through crude statements like, “that guy's an 8,” or more politically correct comments such as, “I believe she may be out of your league,” there is a tacit acknowledgment by society that every individual has an aggregate value on the public dating market, and that value can be judged at a glance. When what we have to trade on the dating market is often ourselves, that means that on average, we are going to end up in relationships with people with an aggregate value roughly equal to our own (i.e., individuals “within our league”). Statistically speaking, leagues are a real phenomenon that affects dating patterns. Using data from dating websites, the University of Michigan found that when you sort online daters by desirability, they seem to know “their place.” People on online dating sites almost never send a message to someone less desirable than them, and on average they reach out to prospects only 25% more desirable than themselves.

The great thing about these markets is how often the average desirability of a person to others is wildly different than their desirability to you. This gives you the opportunity to play arbitrage with traits that other people don’t like, but you either like or don’t mind. For example, while society may prefer women who are not overweight, a specific individual within the marketplace may prefer obese women, or even more interestingly may have no preference. If a guy doesn’t care whether his partner is slim or obese, then he should specifically target obese women, as obesity lowers desirability on the open marketplace, but not from his perspective, giving him access to women who are of higher value to him than those he could secure within an open market.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships

“Clarity of mission is important for acceleration. If you have a mission, but others don’t understand or your actions contradict it, then it will be less contagious.”
― Raoul Davis Jr., Firestarters: How Innovators, Instigators, and Initiators Can Inspire You to Ignite Your Own Life

“In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still.”
― Pico Iyer

“The levelling of the European man is the great process which cannot be obstructed; it should even be accelerated. The necessity of cleaving gulfs, distance, order of rank, is therefore imperative —not the necessity of retarding this process. This homogenizing species requires justification as soon as it is attained: its justification is that it lies in serving a higher and sovereign race which stands upon the former and can raise itself this task only by doing this. Not merely a race of masters whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an overflow of energy for beauty, bravery, culture, and manners, even for the most abstract thought; a yea-saying race that may grant itself every great luxury —strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative, rich enough to have no need of economy or pedantry; beyond good and evil; a hothouse for rare and exceptional plants.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Minimum wage, minimum effort”
― Graham McNamee

“Gari ya Debbie huchukua sekunde 12 kutoka kilometa 0 mpaka kilometa 210 kwa saa. Huchukua sekunde 10 kutoka kilometa 210 kwa saa mpaka kilometa 0. Ina uwezo wa kusimama haraka kuliko inavyoweza kukimbia.”
― Enock Maregesi

“She preferred the times when she could pretend that she was in a gravity well to the little reminders that she was the puppet of acceleration and inertia.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“Acceleration is pressing his eyeballs out of their right shape. High tech astigmatism.”
― James S.A. Corey, Drive

“He is, however,” Amos continued, “keeping a constant rail gun lock on the Israel’s reactor.”

Holden ran his fingers through his hair. “So not too generous, then.”

“Say pretty please, but carry a one-kilo slug of tungsten accelerated to a detectable percentage of c.”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn

“I have noticed that the solar radiation reflections from rippled privacy windows cause greatly accelerated growth patterns in plants”
― Steven Magee, Light Forensics

“Ideation is important for innovation. But it is only the first step! Incubation must follow and so must acceleration for the circle of innovation to reach completion,or else, you risk expiration.”
― Peter-Cole C. Onele

“Intellectually he knows that the blood is being pressed to the back of his body, pooling in the back part of his cerebellum and flooding his kidneys. He hasn’t done enough medical work to know what that means, but it can’t be good.”
― James S.A. Corey, Drive

“He almost blacks out again, but he’s not sure if it’s the stroke or the thrust gravity. He’s pretty sure driving blood pressure higher while having a stroke is considered poor form.”
― James S.A. Corey, Drive

“This is not for your entertainment. This is for your evolution.”
― Lynda Nguyen

“On the highway of life: 'drive' is about steadily moving forward in your own lane; 'ambition' is about swerving and accelerating into other people's lanes.”
― Rayvern White

“Accelerating progress requires building on foundational innovations, or as Bernard of Chartres stated - “standing on the shoulders of giants”. In the fractured society we live in, the lack of civil discourse makes it difficult to find a stable place where “we are carried aloft and elevated by the magnitude of the giants”. - Tom Golway”
― Tom Golway

“The widely practised conventional change approach is based on the CATS premise first introduced in 1947. However, the pace of technological development is accelerating, and we are no longer chasing a deer. Instead, a tiger is chasing us. We need an evolution approach to face the tiger.”
― Sukant Ratnakar, Quantraz

“Much changes in eighteen months on earth, in the age of acceleration that began around the turn of the millennium and still continues to this day. All our stories are told more quickly now, we are addicted to the acceleration, we have forgotten the pleasures of the old slownesses, of the dawdles, the browses, the three-volume novels, the four-hour motion pictures, the thirteen-episode drama series, the pleasures of duration, of lingering. Do what you have to do, tell your story, live your life, get out quickly, spit spot.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights