Brian Cloutier

“This confirmation problem pervades our modern life, since most conflicts have at their root the following mental bias: when Arabs and Israelis watch news reports they see different stories in the same succession of events. Likewise, Democrats and Republicans look at different parts of the same data and never converge to the same opinions. Once your mind is inhabited with a certain view of the world, you will tend to only consider instances proving you to be right. Paradoxically, the more information you have, the more justified you will feel in your views.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which tings really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, on can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, politics is very similar to magic -- one reason both politics and magic tend, just about everywhere, to be surrounded by a certain halo of fraud.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“From all the great and indispensable achievements the Internet has brought to our era, its emphasis is on the actual more than the contingent, on the factual rather than the conceptual, on values shaped by consensus rather than by introspection. Knowledge of history and geography is not essential for whose who can evoke their data with the touch of a button. The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on Facebook”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“When two people have a clear understanding of power and betrayal, then betrayal itself becomes almost impossible. There is only the ordered flow of events, bringing good to those who deserve to rule.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep