Jeremy McLeod

“When you do a fault analysis, there’s no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can’t change afterward, it’s like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity. Gravity isn’t going to change next time. There’s no point in trying to allocate responsibility to people who aren’t going to alter their actions. Once you look at it from that perspective, you realize that allocating blame never helps anything unless you blame yourself, because you’re the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there.”
― Anonymous

“The greatest admission a human can make is that perhaps he does not have the intelligence, the vision, the grasp to fully understand the universe, and that perhaps no human ever will. To put it all down to some omnipotent deity is a cop-out. Factor in fairy tales of an afterlife and it becomes a comforting cop-out.”
― Neal Asher, The Line of Polity

“It was like watching a videotape of an almost-traffic-accident that had happened to you, where you remembered another car missing you by centimeters, and the video showing that somebody had also thrown a pebble in exactly the right way to cause an enormous lorry to miss that near-collision, and if they hadn’t thrown that pebble then you and all your family in the automobile and your entire planet would have been hit by the lorry, which, in the metaphor, represented your own sheer obliviousness.”
― Anonymous

“human beings only understood each other in the first place by pretending. You didn’t make predictions about people by modeling the hundred trillion synapses in their brain as separate objects. Ask the best social manipulator on Earth to build you an Artificial Intelligence from scratch, and they’d just give you a dumb look. You predicted people by telling your brain to act like theirs. You put yourself in their place. If you wanted to know what an angry person would do, you activated your own brain’s anger circuitry, and whatever that circuitry output, that was your prediction. What did the neural circuitry for anger actually look like inside? Who knew?”
― Anonymous