Farha Crystal

“Attention: deep listening. People are dying in spirit for lack of it. In academic culture, most listening is critical listening. We tend to pay attention only long enough to develop a counterargument; we critique the student’s or the colleague’s ideas; we mentally grade and pigeonhole each other. In society at large, people often listen with an agenda, to sell or petition or seduce. Seldom is there a deep, open-hearted nonjudgmental reception of the other. And so we all talk louder and more stridently and with a terrible desperation. By contrast, if someone truly listens to me, my spirit begins to expand.”
― Mary Rose O'Reilley, Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice

“This does not mean that science is just the art of making measurable predictions. Some philosophers of science overly circumscribe science by limiting it to its numerical predictions. They miss the point, because they confuse the instruments with the objectives. Verifiable quantitative predictions are instruments to validate hypotheses. The objective of scientific research is not just to arrive at predictions: it is to understand how the world functions; to construct and develop an image of the world, a conceptual structure to enable us to think about. Before being technical, science is visionary.”
― Carlo Rovelli, La realtà non è come ci appare: La struttura elementare delle cose

“The comic effect of the satire is derived from the simultaneous presence, in the reader's mind, of the social reality with which he is familiar, and of its reflections in the distorting mirror of the satirist. It focuses attention on abuses and deformities in society of which, blunted by habit, we were no longer aware; it makes us suddenly discover the absurdity of the familiar and the familiarity of the absurd.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“In this chapter, we’ve considered six psychological tendencies that exacerbate intertribal conflict. First, human tribes are tribalistic, favoring Us over Them. Second, tribes have genuine disagreements about how societies should be organized, emphasizing, to different extents, the rights of individuals versus the greater good of the group. Tribal values also differ along other dimensions, such as the role of honor in prescribing responses to threats. Third, tribes have distinctive moral commitments, typically religious ones, whereby moral authority is vested in local individuals, texts, traditions, and deities that other groups don’t recognize as authoritative. Fourth, tribes, like the individuals within them, are prone to biased fairness, allowing group-level self-interest to distort their sense of justice. Fifth, tribal beliefs are easily biased. Biased beliefs arise from simple self-interest, but also from more complex social dynamics. Once a belief becomes a cultural identity badge, it can perpetuate itself, even as it undermines the tribe’s interests. Finally, the way we process information about social events can cause us to underestimate the harm we cause others, leading to the escalation of conflict.”
― Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them