Machiavelli on the baseness of interpreting religion in accordance with indolence

Roy Cohn on choosing, and the worth of the nice man

Wolfe on lies and the people who tell them

Be thankful you're livin', and trust to your luck / And march to your front like a soldier.

Every microservice architecture contains a half-broken reimplementation of Erlang.

making mistakes much faster and in more interesting, expensive ways

"Striving ... to call forth the activity of my faculties by making me find out everything for myself, he gave his explanations not before, but after, I had felt the full force of the difficulties"

Robert Martin on LeBlanc's Law, with some fun recent illustrations

Aquinas on low-power spergism

Every time a person begins to discover to what extent he plays a role and to what extent he can be an actor, he becomes an actor.

The passion of the inventor has nothing whatever to do with its consequences.

Some esoteric proof strategies.

There is no "escape" from politics, no more than there is an escape from "the world" or from our humanity.

Reflections on national sovereignty, cognitive democracy, and the possibility of humanity

Things lie neglected for some years—the manuscripts of Aristotle, for example—and then are recovered and built upon. The fruits of that subsequent labor—the plays of Shakespeare, for instance, or the modern republican form of government—may in their turn soon be left to gather dust for a time.

JFK began a long tradition of people who investigate the CIA committing suicide through multiple self inflicted gun shot wounds to the head. They get very sad with what they find out - the CIA is bad - and don’t want to go on living.

Hsu on the Manhattan Project generation's neurons

to Hugh Everett, as quoted by H.D. Zeh, via Steve Hsu

“Usually the generalists are the best predictors,” or: beware epistemic false modesty from specialists

Resonates. The stereotype threat effect is more accounted for by cognitive overhead introduced by awareness of expectations and ensuing self-monitoring rather than an emotional / affective impact.

“when you have 500 developers working on one live website, it makes sense to pay the cost of a large-scale distributed system if it means the developer teams can work independently ... if you’re a team of 5 and you have 20 microservices ... you’re doing it wrong.”

“You are at an even greater risk for discrimination when applying with a pro-diversity employer because you’re being more transparent ... these companies have the same rate of discrimination, which makes you more vulnerable when you expose yourself to those companies.”

“When disagreements persist despite lengthy good-faith communication, it may not just be about factual disagreements – it could be due to people operating in entirely different frames — different ways of seeing, thinking and/or communicating.”

or: Co-Star, rendered intelligible for the rationalist

“Why are we talking about hatred? It's epiphenomenal.” —Aimee Terese

causal modeling and thick description

tell me about it

genetic isolation intensifies genetic drift. a higher quantity of small, genetically isolated populations may be more likely than fewer non-isolated ones to produce intellectual revolutions.

or: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”

or: against compulsive demands for coherence

or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the fake news