Dan Buller

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Rowdiness and irreverence seemed to be the norm among the kids. Even from behind a still-towering language barrier, I knew I’d never seen students talk to teachers the way Americans did. But what astonished me most was how the informalities appeared to cut both ways. Their dynamic was often adversarial, but jocular as well. Even warm. On an otherwise imposing first day, I instantly knew one thing: I would love American teachers.”
― Fei-Fei Li, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

“To an ESL student, every class is an English class.”
― Fei-Fei Li, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

“Ironically, being an ESL student made it easy for me to speak up. I continued to need so many words and English-language concepts explained that isolated questions became an ongoing dialogue. The more we spoke, the more I realized that he wasn’t anything like the teacher I’d overheard dismissing the intellectual capabilities of girls back in China, or the discouraging restaurant boss who’d all but mocked my love for reading. He could be terse and abrasive, but he never wrote me off the way others had. He was challenging me, and it was working.”
― Fei-Fei Li, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI