Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth.
Political figures who talk a lot about liberty and freedom invariably turn out to mean the freedom to not pay taxes and discriminate based on race; freedom to hold different ideas and express them, not so much.
I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.
[Conventional wisdom] very heavily tends to reflect the preferences and the interests of the elite.
Some people want the past repeated and have an interest in making sure we don’t remember it.
Programmers have a saying: “garbage in, garbage out.
And that’s just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.
The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking.
The problem isn’t that people don’t understand how good things are. It’s that they know, from personal experience, that things really aren’t that good.
I think so long as fossil fuels are cheap, people will use them and it will postpone a movement towards new technologies.