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Dietrich_Bonhoeffer

Stupidity Liberation

“Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the  people’ really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly.”
  • Source: From the paper “An Account at the Turn of the Year 1942-1943” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, contained within the book “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Volume 8: Letters and Papers from Prison” edited by John W. Gruchy, et al. Published in 2009 by Fortress Press.

Francis_Chisholm

Chisholm's 3rd Law of Human Interaction

“Chisholm's 3rd Law of Human Interaction. Purposes, as understood by the purposer, will be judged otherwise by others.
Corollary 1: If you explain so clearly that nobody can misunderstand, somebody will.
Corollary 2: If you do something which you are sure will meet with everybody’s approval, somebody won’t like it.
Corollary 3: Procedures devised to implement the purpose won’t quite work.
Corollary 4: No matter how long or how many times you explain, no one is listening.”
  • Source: From the essay “The Chisholm Effect” by Francis P. Chisholm, included in the anthology “A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown: Essays for a Scientific Age” edited by Robert A. Baker, published by Prentice Hall in 1982. ISBN: 0138526087, ISBN: 978-0138526085.

Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

Idea Selection and Production

“External forces are very important in determining which new ideas will be selected from among the many available; but they cannot explain their production.”
  • Source: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience“, chapter “The Rules of the Games of the Mind”, page 126. Original content published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 1990. Kindle edition published by Harper Collins in 2008. ISBN: 978-0061876721.

DeMarco and Lister

Project Failures

"We observe that about 15 percent of all projects studied came to naught: They were canceled or aborted or 'postponed' or they delivered products that were never used. For bigger projects, the odds are even worse. Fully 25 percent of projects that lasted 25 work-years or more failed to complete. In the early surveys, we discarded these failed data points and analyzed the others. Since 1979, though, we’ve been contacting whoever is left of the project staff to find out what went wrong. For the overwhelming majority of the bankrupt projects we studied, there was not a single technological issue to explain the failure."
  • Source: Book:: Entitled: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Edition: 3rd. Written by: Tom DeMarco; Tim Lister. Date published: 1987; 1999; 2013. Publisher: Addison-Wesley. Country: USA; GBR; CAN; DEU; FRA; ESP; ZAF; AUS; JPN; SGP; MEX. Language: en. ISBN: ISBN-13: 978-0-321-93411-6 (alk paper); 0-321-93411-3 (alk paper). Chapter: 1 (Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing).

Stuart_Hameroff

Brain Neurons

“Well I used to think as other people do that the brain is a computer and I think instead, as I have said before, it's more of a multi-scale hierarchical system. More like a musical system in some sense. I'd refer to it as a quantum orchestra. Because I think the computational metaphor doesn't work because, well it works to a point but it treats neurons  as simple on/off switches and that's an insult to neurons... If you go inside neurons there's all this interesting, I hate to use the word complex because I think complexity is often the last refuge of the bewildered. Just say it's complex and that explains everything which I think is wrong. But you have all this structure, these microtubules doing all this interesting quantum stuff and quantum computation reducing by OR [Orchestrated Objective Reduction/Orch OR] is not the kind of computation I was disillusioned with. So, I'd say that one thing is that the brain is a multi-scale hierarchal system more like music than a classical computer.”
  • Source: Stuart Hameroff speaking in the YouTube video entitled “Sir Roger Penrose & Stuart Hameroff: Collapsing a theory of quantum consciousness? Part 2 (248)” on the channel entitled “Dr Brian Keating” streamed live 2022-08-05, retrieved 2024-04-17 from <https://www.youtube.com/live/OoDi856wLPM?si=XJrLm0AVUIl_dECG>.

Sabine_Hossenfelder

Answers and Explanations

“During more than a decade in public outreach, I noticed that physicists are really good at answering questions, but really bad at explaining why anyone should care about their answers.”
  • Source: Hossenfelder, Sabine. Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions (p. xiii). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Arthur_Schopenhauer

Materialism

“Materialism is therefore the attempt to explain what is directly given to us from what is given indirectly.

Kastrup, Bernardo. Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe (p. 71). Collective Ink. Kindle Edition. ”

  • Source: Arthur Schopenhauer in his book “The World as Will and Representation”, originally published in German in 1818.

Mark_Seemann

Rubber Duck

“The mere act of explaining a problem tends to produce new insight. If you don’t have a colleague, you may try explaining the problem to a rubber duck.”
  • Source: Mark Seemann, “Code That Fits in Your Head: Heuristics for Software Engineering”. Published in 2021 by Pearson Education, Kindle Edition, ISBN: 978-0-13-746440-1. Page 239.

Rebecca_Shafir

Misunderstanding

“Here’s an alarming fact: of approximately eight hundred thousand words in the English language, we use about eight hundred on a regular basis. Those eight hundred words have fourteen thousand meanings. By division there are about seventeen meanings per word. In other words, we have a one-in-seventeen chance of being understood as we intended. Perhaps you’ve heard of Chisholm’s Third Law — If you explain something so clearly that no one can misunderstand, someone will.”
  • Source: From the book “The Zen of Listening: Mindful Communication in the Age of Distraction”, written by Rebecca Z. Shafir, published by Quest Books in 2003. ISBN: ‎978-0835608268,

Baruch_Spinoza

Explanations

“Very many controversies have arisen from the fact, that men do not rightly explain their meaning, or do not rightly interpret the meaning of others. For, as a matter of fact, as they flatly contradict themselves, they assume now one side, now another, of the argument, so as to oppose the opinions, which they consider mistaken and absurd in their opponents.”