One of the important rules about how fear works is that the fearful individual focuses obsessively on the feared object. There is a good evolutionary reason for this: when in danger it is important not to get distracted by other things and
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“The overconfidence of scientists is probably necessary: Let them believe they are on the trail of something big, something important, and they will slave away for their entire lives, working, arguing, debating, exploring.”
― Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine
― Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine
“The idea of delivering information by telephone is actually a pretty good one, but the medium does not support it. Voice is too slow, too transient, and the telephone keypad too limited.”
― Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine
― Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine
“But the people who have recently come to dominance and those who will come to dominance in the new century are increasingly aware—or can be made aware—that freedom still works in their own lives and that they effectively exempt themselves from most of the laws that take freedom away from other people.”
― What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation
― What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation
“One of the principal marks of an educated man is the fact that he does not take his opinions from newspapers -- not, at any rate, from the militant, crusading newspapers. On the contrary, his attitude toward them is almost always one of frank cynicism, with indifference as its mildest form and contempt as its commonest. He knows that they are constantly falling into false reasoning about the things within his personal knowledge, within the narrow circle of his special education, and so he assumes that they make the same, or even worse, errors about other things,whether intellectual or moral. This assumption, it may be said, is quite justified by the facts.”
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“Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context, and emotion.”
― Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine
― Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine
Claudio’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Claudio’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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