Andrew Gerber

“And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.”
― Neal Stephenson, Anathem

“Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget.”
― Daniel Suarez, Freedom™

“Ignoring differences is a central feature of categorization. To categorize is to stereotype. When a color is uncategorizable, however, the opposite of stereotyping occurs. Rather than lumping together all the different colors, you appreciate all the little differences. Because our skin color cannot be categorized, we are better able to see very minor deviations in skin color, and therefore register minor changes in others’ skin color as they occur.”
― Mark Changizi, The Vision Resolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision

“physicist David Deutsch’s defense of enlightenment, The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch argues that if we dare to understand, progress is possible in all fields, scientific, political, and moral: Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures—all evils—are due to insufficient knowledge. . . . Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved. Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved. An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism. Its institutions keep improving, and the most important knowledge that they embody is knowledge of how to detect and eliminate errors.3”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress