“He doesn’t want us to submit because He’s a vengeful, dickish Old Testament-style of God, who gets off on watching us grovel, although there’s a reason why He decided to put these images in the Good Book. He wants us to submit because that is the only way to break the vicious cycle of prideful [Human Propensity to F Things Up].”

“…there is a lack of robots in Star Trek…This is where Star Wars seems to have a leg up in the future vision stakes as their are robots everywhere. But Star Wars has always had better economics, it is the political economy that makes no sense.”

“Emergent systems are nonlinear, meaning they do not arise through chains of causation. They are instead networks shaped by teh back and forth influences of mutual causation. Each node in such a network influences and is influenced by other nodes through positive and negative feedback signals that, taken together, generate the order as a whole. The order is a kind of pattern in relationships rather than an arrangement of objects, which themselves might be individually mobile and transient. Objects come and go; the pattern remains.”

A map to online virality: “So that leaves us with the stories that don’t make it. These are the articles and essays that have fallen into the valley of ambiguity…Who wants to share a story that can be misunderstood?”

“In fact, designing the way elements adapt and morph in the in-between moments is half of your work as a designer. You’re crafting the interstitials.”

“What high-openness liberals feel as mere nostalgia, low-openness conservatives feel as the baseline emotional tone of a recognizably decent life. If your kids don’t experience the same meaningful things in the same same way that you experienced them, then it may seem that their lives will be deprived of meaning, which would be tragic. And even if you’re able to see that your kids will find plenty of meaning, but in different things and in different ways, you might well worry about the possibility of ever really understanding and relating to them. The inability to bond over profound common experience would itself constitute a grave loss of meaning for both generations.”

“And here lies the problem. Primarily for geopolitical reasons, the United States has enlisted Pakistan as an ally on three occasions: during the Cold War (1954–1972), the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan (1979–1989) and the war against terrorism (2001–present). In each instance, the U.S. motive for seeking a Pakistani alliance has been different from Pakistan’s reasons for accepting it.”