Jay Tse

“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

“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

“it’s especially hard to change a conspiracy theorist’s mind, because their theories are “self-sealing,” in that even absence of evidence for the theory becomes evidence for the theory. That is, the reason there’s no proof of the conspiracy, the thinking goes, is because the conspirators did such a good job of covering it up.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“If you have to silence people who disagree with you, does that mean you have no good arguments for why they’re mistaken?”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters