When intelligence is no longer required for survival, it is instead expended on ever more baroque ways of being wrong.
Erring
Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.
—Cunningham
Just as there are ideas so mad that you must be clever to believe them, so there is behavior so weird that you must be clever to engage in it.
No matter how bad your argument is, you can be sure it’s not original.
There are no double standards, only invidious criteria.
There is small reason to believe, outside of a few specialized fields, that a proposition is correct because it can be persuasively argued for.
It is natural, if you believe that speech is violence, to believe that violence is speech.
There’s no shame in being wrong, only in not paying for it.
People will swallow just about any story. Only when it’s not a story do we refuse to swallow it.
Problems without solutions do less harm than solutions without problems.
I am working toward a world in which someday someone will be so wrong, so often, that he will just stop talking.