“I was on the side of righteousness, and like any fundamentalist, I could only stay there by avoiding information.”
-Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth
The myth of ability
“Historically, societies have always been divided by myths of difference: between peasants and nobility, slaves and slave owners, or minorities and majorities. Today, the most pervasive and enduring of those myths — the myth of ability — is being challenged.”
-John Mighton (The Myth of Ability)
Automation vs. ownership
“Where once workers enjoyed their work but were unable to produce enough to give themselves leisure and material satisfactions, now they are gaining the leisure and material satisfactions while losing the enjoyment of work.”
-Melvin Kransberg & Joseph Gies, By the Sweat of Thy Brow (1975)
Being too clever
“Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you are as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?”
-Brian Kernighan
Don’t reinvent the world
“Our job is not to reinvent the world; it’s to take stuff that we know exists already — but hardly anyone’s got it — and get it out to them.”
-Steve Jobs, 1997 [link]
The basic elements of creativity
“Creativity isn’t magic. It happens by applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials…. These are the basic elements of creativity: copy, transform, and combine.”
-Kirby Ferguson, Everything is a Remix
When students realize who school is for
“When teachers are judging them, students will sabotage the teacher by not trying. But when students understand that school is for them—a way for them to grow their minds—they do not insist on sabotaging themselves.
“In my work, I have seen tough guys shed tears when they realize they can become smarter. It’s common for students to… adopt an air of indifference, but we make a mistake if we think any student stops caring.”
-Carol Dweck (Mindset, p.201)
Math interfaces
“Mathematics, as currently practiced, is a command line. We need a better interface.”
-Bret Victor [link]
Ability is learned, not fixed
“After forty years of intensive research on school learning in the United States as well as abroad, my major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if provided with the appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.”
-Benjamin Bloom (via Mindset by Carol Dweck)
Comfort zone
“If you don’t work at the edge of your comfort zone, your comfort zone will shrink.”
-Alan Oppenheim