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
“When the machine fails, often with no advance warning, people are suddenly thrust into the process, suddenly asked to figure out the current state of the system, what has gone wrong, and what should be done.”
― 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
“Almost every advance in the science and technology of computation, control, and communication has also been described as an advance in the science of thought processes, usually without any evidence, usually by people who had never studied people.”
― 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
“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
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