Fedon B

“In England and Wales, students were expected to pick a path with knowledge only of the limited menu they had been exposed to early in high school. That is sort of like being forced to choose at sixteen whether you want to marry your high school sweetheart. At the time it might seem like a great idea, but the more you experience, the less great that idea looks in hindsight. In England and Wales, adults were more likely to get divorced from the careers they had invested in because they settled down too early.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Technology does not make us smarter. People do not make technology smart. It is the combination of the two, the person plus the artifact, that is smart. Together, with our tools, we are a powerful combination. On the other hand, if we are suddenly without these external devices, then we don’t do very well. In many ways, we do become less smart.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

“Cas Wouters, inspired by conversations with Elias late in his life, suggests that we are living through a new phase in the Civilizing Process. This is the long-term trend of informalization I mentioned earlier, and it leads to what Elias called a “controlled decontrolling of emotional controls” and what Wouters calls third nature.182 If our first nature consists of the evolved motives that govern life in a state of nature, and our second nature consists of the ingrained habits of a civilized society, then our third nature consists of a conscious reflection on these habits, in which we evaluate which aspects of a culture’s norms are worth adhering to and which have outlived their usefulness.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
― Alfred North Whitehead