All Quotes

"Seeing the psychologist Steven Pinker making pronouncements about things intellectual has a similar effect to encountering a drive-in Burger King while hiking in the middle of a national park."

"Evidence of submission is displayed by the employee’s going through years depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, his ritualistic and punctual arrival at an office, his denying himself his own schedule, and his not having beaten up anyone on the way back home after a bad day. He is an obedient, housebroken dog."

"What we saw worldwide from 2014 to 2018, from India to the U.K. to the U.S., was a rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy League, Oxford-Cambridge or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think, and… 5) whom to vote for."

"If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life."

"Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later."

"Studying neurobiology to understand humans is like studying ink to understand literature."

"Taleb's distorted sense of social science leads him to make absolute absurd claims concerning the value of analytical modeling. For example, I have in my house ...a wall full of books on statistics and the history of statistics, books I never had the fortitude to burn or throw away; though I find them largely useless outside of their academic applications ...I cannot use them in class because I promised myself never to teach trash, even if dying of starvation." This is a completely incorrect assessment of the role of statistics in the social sciences. Statistical reasoning is quite central to all of social theory and the evaluation of evidence for and against particular social science models, including the evaluation of pharmaceuticals, modeling the demographics of disease, testing products for beneficial and harmful effects, and a host of others. Taleb's generalization from the weakness of standard financial economics to the whole of mathematical discipline is quite unwarranted. However, he does not stop there. All of academia is tarred with his brush of hypocrisy and irrelevance. "...almost all academic papers," he claims, "are made to bore, impress, provide credibility, intimidate even, be presented at meetings, but not to be read except by suckers (or detractors) or, even worse, graduate students." Note that he claims not simply that academic papers "bore," but that is what they are made for! And he claims that academic papers "are not to be read except by suckers"! Taleb's writing is filled with unsubstantiated and improbable statements of this type."

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

"[ Computing ] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around."

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

"A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points."

"Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born."

"The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to."

"I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras."

"Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."

"... greatest single programming language ever designed. (About the Lisp programming language.)"

"I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!”"

"Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves."

"Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn't think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years."

"Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful. But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever."

"Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture."

"Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out."

"If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It's just secret to this pop culture."

"I fear —as far as I can tell— that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. I've heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification."

"The "scanned symbol" is the only one of which the machine is... "directly aware". However, by altering its m-configuration the machine can effectively remember some of the symbols which it has "seen" (scanned) previously."

"Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There's an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.” Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we're in — the one that we think is reality."

"I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher."

"The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully."

"However, I am no big fan of Smalltalk either, even though it compares very favourably with most programming systems today (I don't like any of them, and I don't think any of them are suitable for the real programming problems of today, whether for systems or for end-users)."

"Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)"

"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."

"Object-oriented [programming] never made it outside of Xerox PARC; only the term did."

"If you had told me 28 years ago that the largest organization in the world touching the lives of gays and lesbians would be a church, I would not have believed you. So many members of the lesbian and gay community feel they have had violence done to them by religious groups that it is very difficult to evangelize any members of our community. But we do evangelize."

"Jesus died for our sins, not our sexuality."

"Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning... The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings."

"Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself."

"A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine."

"There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily."

"This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be. We have to have some experience with the machine before we really know its capabilities. It may take years before we settle down to the new possibilities, but I do not see why it should not enter any one of the fields normally covered by the human intellect, and eventually compete on equal terms."

"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition."

"The Exclusion Principle is laid down purely for the benefit of the electrons themselves, who might be corrupted (and become dragons or demons) if allowed to associate too freely."

"Let us now assume, for the sake of argument, that these machines are a genuine possibility, and look at the consequences of constructing them. To do so would of course meet with great opposition, unless we have advanced greatly in religious toleration from the days of Galileo. There would be great opposition from the intellectuals who were afraid of being put out of a job. It is probable though that the intellectuals would be mistaken about this. There would be plenty to do, trying to understand what the machines were trying to say, i.e. in trying to keep one’s intelligence up to the standard set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon”."

"The "computable" numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by finite means. ...According to my definition, a number is computable if its decimal can be written down by a machine. ...I show that certain large classes of numbers are computable. They include, for instance, the real parts of all s, the real parts of the zeros of the Bessel functions, the numbers π, e, etc. The computable numbers do not, however, include all definable numbers. ...[C]onclusions are reached which are superficially similar to those of Gödel. ...[I]t is shown ...that the Hilbertian can have no solution. In a recent paper ... reaches similar conclusions..."

"We may compare a man in the process of computing a real number to a machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions q1, q2, ..., qK which will be called " m-configurations "."

"The machine is supplied with a "tape" (the analogue of paper) running through it, and divided into sections (called "squares") each capable of bearing a "symbol"."

"In some of the configurations in which the scanned square is blank... the machine writes down a new symbol on the scanned square: in other configurations it erases the scanned symbol."

"The machine may also change the square which is being scanned, but only by shifting it one place to right or left."

"[T]he m-configuration may be changed."

"Some of the symbols written down will form the sequence of figures which is the decimal of the real number... being computed. The others are just rough notes to "assist the memory ". ...[O]nly ...these rough notes ...will be liable to erasure."

"[T]hese operations include all those which are used in the computation..."