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21 " Children need practice dealing with other people. With people, practice never leads to perfect. But perfect isn’t the goal. Perfect is the goal only in a simulation. Children become fearful of not being in control in a domain where control is not the point. Beyond this, children use conversations with one another to learn how to have conversations with themselves. For children growing up, the capacity for self-reflection is the bedrock of development. I worry that the holding power of the screen does not encourage this. It jams that inner voice by offering continual interactivity or continual connection. Unlike time with a book, where one’s mind can wander and there is no constraint on time out for self-reflection, “apps” bring children back to the task at hand just when a child’s mind should be allowed to wander. So in addition to taking children away from conversation with other children, too much time with screens can take children away from themselves. It is one thing for adults to choose distraction over self-reflection. But children need to learn to hear their own voices. "
― John Brockman , What Should We Be Worried About? Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night
22 " In science the credit goes to the man who convinced the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. "
― John Brockman , This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
23 " A system that makes no errors is not intelligent. "
― John Brockman , This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works
24 " it is difficult to discern where “you” end and the remainder of the world begins. "
25 " Creativity is a fragile flower, but perhaps it can be fertilized with systematic doses of serendipity. "
26 " Our sun is less than halfway through its life. It formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got 6 billion more years before the fuel runs out. It "
27 " Happy brains are all alike; every unhappy brain is unhappy in its own way. "
28 " Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don’t know, not a weakness to avoid. "
29 " Science itself is learning how to better exploit negative results. "
30 " What the mediocrity principle tells us is that our state is not the product of intent, that the universe lacks both malice and benevolence, but that everything does follow rules—and that grasping those rules should be the goal of science. "
31 " Evolution by means of natural selection (or indeed any kind of selection—natural or unnatural) provides the most beautiful, elegant explanation in all of science. "
32 " Defeasible beliefs provide the provisional certainty necessary to navigate an uncertain world. "
33 " Consider the world we could live in if all of our local and global leaders, if all of our personal and professional friends and foes, recognized the defeasibility of their beliefs and acted accordingly. That sure sounds like progress to me. But of course I could be wrong. "
34 " delight in good ideas. "
35 " Illusions are a necessary consequence of intelligence. Cognition requires going beyond the information given, to make bets and therefore to risk errors. Would we be better off without visual illusions? We would in fact be worse off—like a person who never says anything to avoid making any mistakes. A system that makes no errors is not intelligent. "
36 " In biology especially, we have labels for everything—molecules, anatomical parts, physiological functions, organisms, ideas, hypotheses. The nominal fallacy is the error of believing that the label carries explanatory information. "
37 " We all start from radical ignorance in a world that is endlessly strange, vast, complex, intricate, and surprising. Deliverance from ignorance lies in good concepts—inference fountains that geyser out insights that organize and increase the scope of our understanding. "
38 " Imagine the typical emotional reaction to seeing a spider: fear, ranging from minor trepidation to terror. But what is the likelihood of dying from a spider bite? Fewer than four people a year (on average) die from spider bites, establishing the expected risk of death by spider at lower than 1 in 100 million. This risk is so minuscule that it is actually counterproductive to worry about it: Millions of people die each year from stress-related illnesses. The startling implication is that the risk of being bitten and killed by a spider is less than the risk that being afraid of spiders will kill you because of the increased stress. "
39 " I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?”) "
40 " The idea that we can systematically understand certain aspects of the world and make predictions based on what we’ve learned, while appreciating and categorizing the extent and limitations of what we know, plays a big role in how we think. "