“The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you’re unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself [...]
If someone finds ways to exclude any source of possibly disconfirming evidence from the realm of credible authorities, they are probably a crank. — Megan McArdle
Okay, I started out calling it Megan’s Law. I thought it sounded familiar.
That profound imaginative connection with the great void is one of the things that separates science fiction writers and fans from the unimaginative plodding mass of humanity.
—John Derbyshire
A new piece at Pajamas Media.
Update: Turns out Megan McArdle (Megan, honey, call me) posted on more or less the same topic today, yielding today’s Quote of the Day:
I’m persistently disturbed by the notion that most of our fellow citizens are intellectual children who need to be forced to do what is good for them [...]
We are forever imagining that something new — a new generation, a new technology, a new movement — will finally make people no longer power-hungry, indiscriminately horny, vain, or corrupt. That hope is always disappointed. — Annie Gottlieb
This is something [talk radio] supporters are likely to forget … when they have to come out of their bunkers and deal with the rest of us. They think we’re RINOs and DINOs, but we’re just Americans doing our normal thing and trying to figure things out.
— Roger L. Simon
Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be, whether a long string of perfectly blue days that begin and end in golden dimness, the most seemingly chaotic political acts, the rise of a great city, the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light, the distributions of fortune, what time the milkman [...]
You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.
— Robert A Heinlein
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
— Nancy Lebovitz button, looking for a good source.
In all human history, every great leap forward has been driven by a new clarity of thought. Except for a few natural catastrophes, every great woe has been driven by a stupidity. Our last enemy is ourselves; and this is a war, and we are soldiers.
— Robin Hanson
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