Herval Freire

“Anonymity to outsiders appears to be the crucial factor when individuals feel that they are not accountable, which leads to greater antisocial behavior. Riots, lynching, and hooliganism are all believed to be examples of mob mentality that are thought to thrive through the process of deindividuation.10 In contrast, the more that we lose anonymity, the more we conform and behave. In one simple study, researchers placed a picture of a pair of eyes on the wall above a collection tin in the coffee room where staff members paid for their beverages.11 For the next 10 weeks, they alternated posting pictures of flowers or watchful eyes above the coffee pot. People were more honest in paying for their beverages when the eyes were posted. Just like the self-conscious Halloween children, we are more honest when a mirror is present to reflect our behavior. When we are made self-conscious, we become more accountable.”
― Bruce M. Hood, The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity

“it is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains. They all want to stand on ever higher ground to gaze ever farther into the distance. It is a drive completely divorced from the demands of survival. Had you, for example, been only concerned with staying alive, you would have fled from this mountain as fast and far as you could. Instead, you chose to come and climb it. The reason evolution bestows all intelligent life with a desire to climb higher is far more profound than more base needs, even though we still do not understand its real purpose. Mountains are universal and we are all standing at the feet of mountains.”
― Liu Cixin, The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection

“the recent changes in our reading habits suggest that the “era of mass [book] reading” was a brief “anomaly” in our intellectual history: “We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.” The question that remains to be answered, they went on, is whether that reading class will have the “power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital” or will be viewed as the eccentric practitioners of “an increasingly arcane hobby.”
― Anonymous

“What am I? The data? The process that generates it? The relationships between the numbers?”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City