Harvard University Faculty

"In recent years my focus has been onfoundations of machine learning and safety of artificial intelligence systems."

"“We really don’t understand … how they are exerting their influence,”"

"“We have all these microbes living in us from the time we are born. They’re such an intricate part of our bodies. They’re interacting with us, yet we know so little about them.”"

"But if we really want to be the nation that leads the world in 21st century technologies, then we need a chairman — whoever that may be — who is willing to tackle the hardest of challenges and understands how to harness the power of competition, innovation, and investment to break through today’s bottlenecks."

"We are all paying too much for services that are both uncompetitive and second-class, and not enough Americans are being served adequately by reasonably priced, world-class services."

"Parts carry extreme beliefs and emotions in or on their "bodies" that drive the way they feel and act. … [T]his is how parts describe themselves—that they have bodies[,] and that their bodies contain emotions and beliefs that came into them and don't belong to them. Often, they can tell you the exact traumatic moment these emotions and beliefs came into or attached to them[,] and they can tell you where they carry what seem to them to be these foreign objects in or on their bodies."

"Your emotions and thoughts … emanate from inner personalities I call parts of you. I’m suggesting that what seems like your explosive temper, for example, is more than a bundle of anger. If you were to focus on it and ask it questions, you might learn that it is a protective part of you that defends other vulnerable parts and is in conflict with the parts of you that want to please everyone. It might reveal to you that it has to stay this angry as long as you are so vulnerable and self-sacrificing. You might also learn that it has other feelings, such as fear and sadness, but that it feels as though it must stay in this role of being the angry one to protect you. If you asked it to, it could show you scenes of the point in your life when it was forced into its protective role. It might even show you an image or representation of itself, such as a dragon, volcano, or tough adolescent kid. Most importantly, it can tell you how you can help to release it so it is no longer stuck in this rageful role. With your help, it can change dramatically into a valuable quality so that you’re no longer plagued with a bad temper; instead, for example, you have an increased ability to assert yourself appropriately."

"Most clients had parts that didn't trust the leadership of their Self in the outside world. These parts jumped in to handle many kinds of external experiences because they believed they had to protect the system. They were like parentified children who don't trust that their parent is capable and, consquently, bravely take on responsibilities for the welfare of the family that are beyond their capacities."

"The western mind — and perhaps the American mind in particular — has been trained to equate success with victory, to equate doing well with beating someone."

"The scientific method consists of the use of procedures designed to show not that our predictions and hypotheses are right, but that they might be wrong. Scientific reasoning is useful to anyone in any job because it makes us face the possibility, even the dire reality, that we were mistaken. It forces us to confront our self-justifications and put them on public display for others to puncture. At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control."

"When I asked these protective parts what they’d rather do if they trusted they didn’t have to protect, they often wanted to do something opposite of the role they were in. Inner critics wanted to become cheerleaders or sage advisors, extreme caretakers wanted to help set boundaries, rageful parts wanted to help with discerning who was safe. It seemed that not only were parts not what they seemed, but also they each had qualities and resources to bring to the client’s life that were not available while they were tied up in the protective roles."

"A greater gain to the world...than all the growth of scientific knowledge is the growth of the scientific spirit, with its courage and serenity, its disciplined conscience, its intellectual morality, its habitual response to any disclosure of the truth."

"The legislation of Moses! Let me ask, what other legislation of ancient times is still exerting any influence upon the world? What philosopher, what statesman of ancient times can boast a single disciple now? What other voice comes down to us, over the stormy waves of time? But this man is at this day — at this hour — exerting a mighty influence over millions; the whole Hebrew nation do homage to his illustrious name. Though the daily sacrifice has ceased, and the distinction of the tribes is lost, though the temple has not left one stone upon another, and the altar-fires have been extinguished long ago, still, wherever a Jew is found, — and they are found wherever the foot of an adventurer travels, — he is a living monument of the power which this great Hebrew statesman still has over the minds and hearts of his countrymen. And now let us take one glance at this prophet, at the close of a life so laborious and honored. Up to his one-hundred-and-twentieth year, his eye was not dim, nor had his strength abated. But now, when he stands almost on the edge of the promised land, his last hour of mortal life has come. To conduct his people to that land had been his daily effort, and his nightly dream, and yet he is not permitted to enter it, though it would never have been the home of Israel, but for him. He ascends a mountain to die, and there the land of promise spreads out its romantic landscape at his feet. There is Grilead, with its deep valleys and forest-covered hills; there are the rich plains and pastures of Dan; there is Judah, with its rocky heights, and Jericho, with its palm-trees and rose-gardens; there is Jordan seen from Lebanon downward, winding over its yellow sands; the long blue line of the Mediterranean can be seen over the mountain battlements of the west. On this magnificent deathbed the Statesman of Israel breathed his last. Lest the gratitude which so often follows the dead, though denied to the living, should pay him Divine honors, they buried him in darkness and silence; and no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day."

"It is hardly an exaggeration to summarize the history of four hundred years by saying that the leading idea of a conquering nation in relation to the conquered was, in 1600, to change their religion; in 1700, to change their trade; in 1800, to change their laws, and in 1900 to change their drainage. May we not, then say that on the prow of the conquering ship in these four centuries first stood the priest, then the merchant, then the lawyer, and finally the physician?"

"One of the important problems in the southward movement of the Indo-Iranians or even of early Iranians is the existence of two almost mutually distinct cultures, the Andronovo culture of the steppes of Kazakhstan and the Bactrian Margiana complex."

"Henning further proposes that the relatively swift and easy conquest of eastern Iran by Cyrus the Great presupposes the coexistence of a large ataic or group of stats. Otherwise the conquest would have taken a much longer time. If we follow this line of argument however, one might add that the absence of later revolts against the Achacmemds except in Darius' first year when rebels were everywhere would suggest a background of Median hegemony or some western rule in eastern Iran. In the same views it is easy to believe that Cyrus put an end to the Kiiwarezmian state ruled by Vishtaspaf the patron of Zoroaster, because there are too many imponderables and no real evidence. At the present we can only say that there probably were at least two states or rather confederations in eastern Iran before the Achaemenids with centers in Bactria and Herat. Further, the Median empire probably had relations with one or both and possibly exercised some sort of influence over one or both although there is no proof. Kavi Vishtaapa and Zoroaster fitted into the Herat confederation then before it became unified, if it ever really did, and they did not necessarily have anything to do with Cynia. The possibility that Bacttia reached prominence only under the Achaememds, and after the fail of a Khwiireimian state as suggested by Markwart, is an attractive theory' but again without evidence. So our history of eastern Iran before the Achacmcnids h scanty and conjectural* The sagas of the epic for this period are unreliable as history but they provide a framework for the heroic age which did not require history."

"...On the second day of graduate studies, Harrison walks into my windowless cubicle and asks if I want to be on his payroll. I say, ”Sure” and he walks out. A few weeks go by. I get my first paycheck, and start wondering what I am supposed to do. I get up the courage to go to his two room corner office suite a floor below and ask. He answers, “If you have to ask what to do, I don’t want you working for me.” I say, “OK” and walk out."

"Eric M. Leifer,"

"With one exception, all he cared about was the ideas: if Harrison thought you had a good idea, he would treat you like you had won the Nobel prize even if you were “just” a grad student; and if he thought your idea was rubbish he would tell you exactly that even if you *had* won the Nobel prize. The one exception was that he also, in spite of his gruff and sometimes rude demeanor, really cared for his people."

"...What I learned from him is that the thorniest problems are the most interesting ones, and also to avoid easy answers. Harrison was no fan of well-tried methods (including his own, once they became widespread) and stock explanations, sending us--meaning the students who worked with him most closely--on an unrelenting quest for something innovative."

"Much of the of the Universe is thought to reside in some as yet unidentified . This view is based on the analysis of trajectories of luminous ‘‘tracers’’ that map out the local potential, assuming that gravity is the only long ranged interaction between ordinary and dark matter. This assumption should be tested experimentally if possible. Laboratory tests of the can constrain (at an interesting level) any exotic coupling between ordinary and dark matter when analyzed as a test of the uniformity of towards the center of the Galaxy."

"In my opinion the situation constitutes a crisis in fundamental physics that is every bit as profound as that which preceded the advent of quantum mechanics. ... Today, in the absence of a clear theoretical framework with relevant predictive power, the Dark Energy problem is best characterized as a data and discovery driven endeavor, spiced with interesting theoretical speculation."

"Ground-based and s suffer from sources of image quality degradation that typically preclude achieving the . For 𝐷=10 m class telescopes at optical wavelengths (𝜆 ∼500), the typical achieved of around 1 for a celestial (absent correction) is about 100 times worse than the diffraction limit. A variety of factors contribute to this image degradation, including: • index of refraction variations in the , • “ground layer” or “boundary layer” due to the boundary condition of zero wind velocity at the Earth’s surface, • perturbations to due to local topography and structures, • turbulence within the enclosure, due to ambient and driven airflow through the slit and vents in the dome, • thermally driven air currents due to power dissipation on the telescope top end, and other locations, • turbulence and thermal currents in the vicinity of the primary mirror due to temperature differences between the mirror and the adjacent air, • tracking errors and vibrations in the , • wind-driven oscillations and motions of the mirror support systems, and • quasi-static s in the optical system."

"So when I finished my Ph.D., in retrospect it's kind of hard to believe that I had the audacity to do what I am about to describe. But I sort of looked around and asked myself, "What's the most interesting remaining , and where can I go to work on it?" ... the problem ..."

"One should mention right at the start that one still does not understand whether quantum mechanics and special relativity are compatible at a fundamental level in our Minkowski four-space world. One generally assumes that this means finding a complete Yang-Mills gauge theory or the interaction of gauge fields with fermionic matter fields, the simplest form being quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Associated with this picture is the belief that the fundamental vector meson excitations are massive (as opposed to photons, which arise in the limiting case of an abelian gauge symmetry. The proof of the existence of a “mass gap” appears a necessary integral part of solving the entire puzzle. This question remains one of the deepest open issues in theoretical physics, as well as in mathematics. Basically the question remains: can one give a mathematical foundation to the theory of fields in four-dimensions? In other words, can do quantum mechanics and special relativity lie on the same footing as the classical physics of Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, or Schrödinger—all of which fits into a mathematical framework that we describe as the language of physics. This glaring gap in our fundamental knowledge even dwarfs questions of whether there are other more complicated and sophisticated approaches to physics—those that incorporate gravity, strings, or branes—for understanding their fundamental significance lies far in the future. In fact, one believes that stringy proposals, if they can be fully implemented, have limiting cases that appear as relativistic quantum fields, just as relativistic quantum fields describe non-relativistic quantum theory and classical physics in various limiting cases."

"IE linguistics can agree on the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European etyma "ekwos 'horse'. . . . But let us note [that] the animal terms tell us, in and of themselves, nothing about the cultural uses of those animals or even whether they were domesticated; but only that Proto- Indo-European speakers knew of some kind of horse . . . although not which equid. . . . The fact that the equid *ekwos was the domesticated Equus cabailus spp. Linnaeus . . . come[s] not from etymology but rather from archaeology and paleontology. The most we can do with these prehistoric etyma and their reconstructed proto-meanings, without archaeological and paleontological evidence (which does indeed implicate domestication), is to aver a Proto-Indo-European familiarity with these beasts."

"If an empire, post-World War II America was the empire that dared not speak its name. But these days, on the part of friends and critics alike, the bashfulness has ended."

"Those who are deeply religious may look at evolution not as a challenge, but as a true demonstration of the power of the Creator's ingenuity. The vastness and implications of evolution cannot simplify the sense of admiration for a creator who was able to set such a mechanism in motion. Perhaps the Great Architect of the Universe didn't bother to write every single DNA base and acid in the human genome, but that doesn't detract from his incredible intelligence."

"As a lawyer in the Nuremburg trials, she worked on the prosecution of senior industrialists who contributed to the Nazi war effort. She asked for that assignment because she thought they must have had more choice in what they did than many others in Nazi Germany. It was hard to respond adequately to the horrors of Holocaust and war by blaming either individuals or a country. Those on whom she focused as a prosecutor led the corporate giant IG Farben, employer of slave labor and manufacturer of the gas used in concentration camps. Her investigations were impeded by the firm and by an American officer who didn’t believe in prosecuting industrialists. What Sally took home from her Nuremburg experience was a lesson in the ways power and property impinged informally on the formal workings of the law."

"Her recognition that the personal was political was intuitive and preceded the feminist motto."

"I remember telling her I thought psychedelic drugs would transform society. Wrong pill, she suggested. Contraceptives would matter more."

"You (Sally Falk Moore) demonstrated that seeking to think well is a quality of life issue, and that intellectual honesty is an essential form of courage and a basic human need. You expressed this beautifully in the paper, “Some Political Trials in Africa”. It was about human rights lawyers bringing cases they thought they would probably lose. They wanted to leave a record for the future, to say: “We were here, we cared, and we tried.”"

"Sally was an elegant woman: a classical beauty and with exquisite manners. Given the challenges of being a woman of her generation in the legal world and in academia — someone hard-nosed, strong-willed, and determined — it would be unfortunate if she went down into history as delicate."

"When I came to Harvard Law School from Ethiopia, I never thought that I would find someone with first-hand knowledge of life in a village of East Africa. Our first conversations were like conversations with someone who had left my village a little earlier than me and just needed a little updating on how things have stood since then."

"Sally’s work in legal anthropology was anchored in the idea of social life as process, the idea that social orders are never whole, never complete, always multiple, always under construction, and always being altered, undone, and remade. Sally understood law as, essentially, social projects to fix the present or form the future, and she understood that, whatever the range and variety of laws’ effects, laws would never wholly fix the present or form the future. By studying these social projects over time, using tools of ethnography and history, she showed, we can learn both about the realities of law and, also, about the larger social processes in which legal efforts are embedded. Sally was remarkable for combining a sensitive, finely tuned sense of the utter complexity and, to some extent, unknowability of social life with a supreme and infectious confidence in our ability to actually gain some real understanding of social life; as she put it: “[T]he question must be asked”. It’s hard not to think that a key reason that Sally’s questions, concepts, methods - the sheer power of her thinking - remain so sharp and vital is because they were forged in relation to the ongoing tumult of the world in various key locales (New York City, Wall St, Nuremberg, Kilimanjaro) rather in relation to the various academic contests of the times. This is not to say that she did not situate her work within those academic contests; she painstakingly analyzed massive bodies of work in anthropology and law alongside the presentation of her own ideas. But she had been a Wall Street lawyer at 21 (learning what lawyers do to serve commercial interests and wealth) and a Nuremberg prosecutor at 22 (delving into the business files of the company that manufactured the gas used in the genocide)."

"She was warning me that the persuasiveness of one’s writing should not deflect or disguise leaps in logic and/or insufficient evidence."

"Once a sign of economic power, reading is now the province of those whose time lacks market value."

"Wendell was a man of pronounced individuality, warm in his sympathies, singularly loyal in his attachments, and free from littleness. He never concealed his convictions, which were often critical of modern tendencies and points of view. If he seemed to champion the past at the expense of the present, it was because of his insistence on standards and his veneration for the summits not the table lands of tradition. His conversation had the charm of freedom from the commonplace."

"Words and sentences are subjects of revision; paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision."

"Although women have more opportunities available to them now than in the past, there is still implicit bias, and constant need to fight for equality. Women need support from men and women to break the glass ceiling that still exists."

"The truth is, women in research and science encounter more hardship compared to their male counterparts."

"But never think that you cannot do it because you’re a woman. Don’t hold yourself back.”"

"I feel that the more challenges I have, the more I have energy to tackle the problem”"

"The biggest obstacle is balancing work and a personal life, especially with young kids at an early stage of my career"

"We have always written against the grain, which is the point of critique … of any weight"

"But beneath the phenomenon lie economic and political forces that have to do with the transformative history of the present"

"But not only white people should write about whites, or only men about men, or Navajos about the Navajo, or any human subjects only about themselves and their experiences of the world."

"I wrote an essay some years back in which I made the argument that anthropology is not defined by its content but by its methodological curiosity, by defamiliarization of the world."

"Many see this as “progressive,” but it’s retrogressive as imaginable. A discipline that for a century of its history was anti-essentialist is now sanctioning essentialisms of every kind."

"The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs."