Latest Quotes

“The laws of probability operate everywhere and that being the case, somewhere in the world there is the luckiest person. I mean if you were to go around the world and make a record of the luck in the lives of all the people on earth, and put them on a chart, you'd have a chart like a bell curve. And…”

— Cormac McCarthy, Cormac McCarthy on luck and money

“The normal experience of social software is failure. If you go into Yahoo groups and you map out the subscriptions, it is, unsurprisingly, a power law. There's a small number of highly populated groups, a moderate number of moderately populated groups, and this long, flat tail of failure. And the fa…”

— Clay Shirky, A Group Is It's Own Worst Enemy

“Facebook, and every other large social-networking and information-aggregation company, both convenes and intervenes. Indeed, it convenes in order to intervene. The platform is the conversation. To fully analyze online social dynamics, one has to attend not only to the tension between the group and t…”

— Nicholas Carr, The platform is the conversation

“Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying.”

— The Joker, The Dark Knight

“...we each have this ridiculously finite number of things inscribed in our minds, and what we do, moment by moment, is continuously postulate an extrinsic 'world' for ourselves by reshuffling and recapitulating these ridiculously finite number of things. But it's a completely closed system—there's n…”

— Mark Leyner, REAL WIFE, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel

“The TSA is experimenting with software that tries to detect, by scanning body language, which plane passengers have hostile intentions.”

— Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“As Pole's computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a 'pregnancy prediction' score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to…”

— Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“It's the manager who is the scarce input...”

— Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“As in chess, we can expect to see dramatic gains in the personal and professional lives of people who interpret machine feedback—of all kinds—quickly. A particular personality trait that doesn't come easily to everyone will be needed in a lot of situations: the ability to handle or maybe just ignore…”

— Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“It's interesting to see how Cleverbot convinces a lot of people that it is human. It doesn't try to respond logically to every query, or to correctly parse every sentence from the human. Instead it tries to mimic how an incoherent or slightly crazed human would converse—or perhaps how a pickup artis…”

— Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Outsourcing is still a smaller phenomenon than many people think. Currently imports from China are measured at about 2.7 percent of US consumer spending. Furthermore, for each dollar of imports from China, about fifty-five cents was ultimately spent in the United States preparing the import in some…”

— Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Immigration is vital to the future economic vitality of the United States. If that immigration is Latino, as indeed it often is in the United States, the longer-run effect is to build up entrepreneurship and democratic values in the other countries in this hemisphere.”

— Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Southern Germany is an extremely productive region and we can expect it will become more crowded and also more productive. The top German firms are generating some impressive learning curves.”

— Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“...studies of spelling bees show that the winning spellers are those who not only work hard, but who engage in disciplined forms of study that do not always yield immediate positive feedback.”

— Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Of course, educational institutions aren't ready to admit how much they share with churches. These temples of secularism don't want to admit they are about simple tasks such as motivating the slugs or acculturating people into the work habits and sociological expectations of the so-called educated c…”

— Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“It is rumored that Richard Eng, one of the leading tutor kings, pulls in $1.5 million a year; his face is on billboards, he drives a Lamborghini, and his license plate reads simply 'Richard.'”

— Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“An intelligent machine might come up with a new theory of cosmology, and perhaps no human will be able to understand or articulate that theory. Maybe it will refer to non-visualizable dimensions of space or nonintuitive understandings of time. The machine will tell us that the theory makes good pred…”

— Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Men, on the other hand, were on edge. Moore goes so far in the study as to say that for men, public toilets are 'nightmarish spaces.' The anxiety they reported was centered around 'watching'—being watched by other men, or being perceived to be watching other men—and that this watching was linked to…”

— Julie Beck, The Private Lives Of Public Bathrooms

“At the beginning of the new moon, for example, one's acetylcholine rises along with the capacity to perform. Acetylcholine is traditionally associated with attention. 'The mood it evokes in us is an Energizer Bunny-like pep. That vibe can be used to initiate social interactions, do chores and routin…”

— Dr. Mark Filippi, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Why get hung up on what other people are doing if you go forward and work on what you think is best?”

— Larry Page, Digiday.com