A Commonplace Book

This is the twenty-first century: we basically live in the future.

First, the idea of the multiverse is essentially the fantasy of preserving perfect information. One of the hard things to deal with in life is the fact that you destroy potential information whenever you make a decision. You could even say that's essentially what regret is: a profound problem of incomplete information.

You give a white man a time machine and he's gonna think about going on vacation! He'll think it might be fun to go check out the 1960s, or ancient Rome, or something.... But can you imagine some crazy black man doing that?... [T]ime travel is something only a white man would think is a good idea, and he is welcome to it, as far as I am concerned.

[S]he had made her choices in life, and her choices had made her in return.

The thing about memories isn't that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies.

If the worst thing a physicist could say about a statement is that it was "false," the best thing he could say is that it was "interesting." This was different from saying it was true: most true things were, in fact, uninteresting. Interesting statements lived on the twilit boundary between fact and question; they held the promise of revealing something unexpected and new about the world, and thus were to be treated with respect.

Given that the information you have is necessarily imperfect. Given that the history of events is necessarily under-determined. The history that you choose to believe will determine the person that you are. If only in a small way. You will be a person who chose to see the world one way instead of another. And that choice will color the way you see the world, and your future, and your image in a mirror.... [Y]ou can determine what kind of person you want to be.

If Big Tobacco's cunning had once involved dosing brands of cigarettes with particular chemical cocktails so that you'd quickly come to prefer them above all others, and Big Pharma's talent was convincing people that what they thought were minor inconveniences or unfortunate quirks of character were in fact problems that required medication, then Big Data's gift, the way it kept itself growing stronger, was in its ability to persuade the majority of people that the unique collection of physical and personality characteristics that they naively referred to as the "self" was in fact made up of a complex matrix of statistical values, too complicated for humans to process but not so hard for computers to comprehend.

Arrogance. It comes in two flavors. The first is the arrogance of youth. A person new to the field is full of ideas and high on his own promises of disruption, and thinks he will change the world with new thinking and sheer exuberance. But the second is the arrogance of old age, and this is far more dangerous.

...[T]he arrogance of old age can cloak itself in the authority of past accomplishments, which can serve to confirm the belief that one's arrogance is justly held. It can shield a man from the realization that his beliefs have calcified, that he can no longer assess a situation accurately at first glance, that the world has changed around him and left him behind.

History lives in the gap between the information and the truth.

Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to make decisions about right and wrong for yourself on a case-by-case basis. Wouldn't it be nice if you had a good book, and you could just follow the directions in it to the letter and be assured you'll never step on anyone's toes, never piss anyone off, never do anything wrong. But life isn't, you know, neat like that.

"The greatest corporate coup of the twentieth century was not the decision of the federal government to treat corporations as persons, but the success of corporations in convincing the people to confuse their real identities with the shadow personalities that exist on our servers, the versions of their selves that we control."