Noah

“One of the secrets of the universe was that our instincts were sometimes stronger than our minds.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I love swimming"
"I know," I said.
"I love swimming," he said again. He was quiet for a little while. And then he said, "I love swimming—and you."
I didn't say anything.
"Swimming and you, Ari. Those are the things I love the most.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I knew that a part of him would never be the same. They cracked more than his ribs.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Racism, at the individual level, can be seen as a predictive model whirring away in billions of human minds around the world. It is built from faulty, incomplete, or generalized data. Whether it comes from experience or hearsay, the data indicates that certain types of people have behaved badly. That generates a binary prediction that all people of that race will behave that same way. Needless to say, racists don’t spend a lot of time hunting down reliable data to train their twisted models. And once their model morphs into a belief, it becomes hardwired. It generates poisonous assumptions, yet rarely tests them, settling instead for data that seems to confirm and fortify them. Consequently, racism is the most slovenly of predictive models. It is powered by haphazard data gathering and spurious correlations, reinforced by institutional inequities, and polluted by confirmation bias.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy