Alexander

“I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“One can speculate that the tardiness and wobbliness of humanity's progress on many of the "eternal problems" of philosophy are due to the unsuitability of the human cortex for philosophical work. On this view, our most celebrated philosophers are like dogs walking on their hind legs - just barely attaining the treshold level of performance required for engaging in the activity at all.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“What is dangerous is not making mistakes, but to be so enamored of one’s point of view that one does not let facts get in the way. To make progress, we have to constantly go back to the facts, acknowledge our errors, and move”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“A poll for the Knight Foundation in 2019 found that “more than two-thirds (68 percent) of college students say their campus climate precludes students from expressing their true opinions because their classmates might find them offensive.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth