Free speech should be viewed as sacred and inviolable not simply for its own sake, but for utterly pragmatic reasons. Only through an active, vibrant, noisy ferment of criticism can blunders be discov...
What are the most common traits of nearly all forms of mental illness? The answer? Nearly all sufferers lack— flexibility— to be able to change your opinion or course of action, if shown clear evidenc...
Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Buddha and countless other mystics, in countless cultures, have preached the same thing -- that we all exist amid a blur of uncertainty. That one can never know complete truth...
Someday we may look back on this era as a time when rational compromises might have enhanced both security and liberty, but those compromises were refused because each side was so busy self-righteousl...
Someone once said that one measure of sentience was how much energy a sophont spent on matters other than survival. Fiben
Strong privacy advocates—especially those promoting encryption and anonymity—may deny that this phenomenon is a direct physical corollary of their message, so I will let the reader decide whether a ph...
That’s not how human psychology works. No, we tend to do lots of things without knowing why. We need excuses, though, so we rationalize! If an obvious reason for our behavior isn’t readily available,...
The best means to an end are not always those that appear most direct.
Why is the future always … in the future?
The greedy and the power-hungry will always look for ways to break the rules, or twist them to their advantage.
The measure of (mental) health is flexibility (not comparison to some ‘norm’), the freedom to learn from experience … to be influenced by reasonable arguments … and the appeal to the emotions … and es...
We are, at our core, information pack rats and inveterate correlators.
The radicals are right about that. Diversity is the key. But it need not be the same diversity as existed before mankind. Indeed, it cannot be the same. We are in a time of changes. Species will pass...
The species greatest harvest words.
The variety of inventive ideas—and ideologies—that people can come up with never ceases to amaze me, especially when they’re stoked by the ultimate drug, self-righteousness.
The village is coming back, like it or not.
Then again: from the critic's point of view, one of the truly wonderful things about the Star Wars universe is that the territory is so sprawling and borrows from so many sources that it's possible to...
Yet egotism can also be useful to ambitious creatures, driving their single-minded pursuit of success. Madness seems essential in order to be great.
All facts are created equal.
Where subtlety fails us we must simply make do with cream pies.
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