Jay Tse

“Capitalism is not, as its defenders insist, a system designed to distribute wealth, but one designed to capture and concentrate it. The fairy tale that capitalism tells about itself—that you become rich through hard work and enterprise—is the greatest propaganda coup in human history.”
― George Monbiot, Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism

“Being able to spot bullshit based on data is a critical skill. Decades ago, fancy language and superfluous detail might have served a bullshitter’s needs. Today, we are accustomed to receiving information in quantitative form, but hesitant to question that information once we receive it. Quantitative evidence generally seems to carry more weight than qualitative arguments. This weight is largely undeserved—only modest skill is required to construct specious quantitative arguments. But we defer to such arguments nonetheless. Consequently, numbers offer the biggest bang for the bullshitting buck.”
― Carl T. Bergstrom, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World

“One of the peculiar realities of conspiracism is that people who believe in conspiracy theories rarely ever believe just one; most conspiracy theories are interconnected by the nature of their afactual grounding, and often this forms a web of theories that lead to radicalization. This is why anti-vaxxers’ conspiracies coalesced so seamlessly with far-right extremist movements in COVID denialism, and moreover why that commingling became a global phenomenon.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy

“A major theme of this book is that none of us, thinking alone, is rational enough to consistently come to sound conclusions: rationality emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other’s fallacies.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters