Jon Archer

“I thought of walks in the English countryside, where people start shouting at you as soon as you stray from the footpath.”
― George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life

“Defeasible beliefs provide the provisional certainty necessary to navigate an uncertain world.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“After several decades of empirical study, Jaques concluded that just as humans differ in intelligence, we differ in our ability to handle time-dependent complexity. We all have a natural time horizon we are comfortable with: what Jaques called “time span of discretion,” or the length of the longest task an individual can successfully undertake.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Consider the world we could live in if all of our local and global leaders, if all of our personal and professional friends and foes, recognized the defeasibility of their beliefs and acted accordingly. That sure sounds like progress to me. But of course I could be wrong.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking