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Quote by Em Bôssmann

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Em Bôssmann

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“If you asked me if I'd rather spend my days chasing beasts and foraging berries or spend them in my air-conditioned apartment with Netfliex queued up and DoorDash delivery a button away, I don't have to tell you which I'd pick. But we know it's not our screens, our salaries, and our stuff that we'll be thinking about on our deathbeds. We know that what really matters in the grand scheme of life are the connections in our environments: the joy and meaning we experience, and the relationships we build.”

InspirationalHumorScienceLongevity
Book:The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Art, Service, and Belonging
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“The scientific project starts by rejecting the fantasy of infallibility and proceeding to construct an information network that takes error to be inescapable. Sure, there is much talk about the genius of Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein, but none of them is considered faultless. They all made mistakes, and even the most celebrated scientific tracts are sure to contain errors and lacunae. Since even geniuses suffer from confirmation bias, you cannot trust them to correct their own errors. Science is a team effort, relying on institutional collaboration rather than on individual scientists or, say, a single infallible book. Of course, institutions too are prone to error. Scientific institutions are nevertheless different from religious institutions, inasmuch as they reward skepticism and innovation rather than conformity. Scientific institutions are also different from conspiracy theories, inasmuch as they reward self-skepticism. Conspiracy theorists tend to be extremely skeptical regarding the existing consensus, but when it comes to their own beliefs, they lose all their skepticism and fall prey to confirmation bias. The trademark of science is not merely skepticism but self-skepticism, and at the heart of every scientific institution we find a strong self-correcting mechanism. Scientific institutions do reach a broad consensus about the accuracy of certain theories—such as quantum mechanics or the theory of evolution—but only because these theories have managed to survive intense efforts to disprove them, launched not only by outsiders but by members of the institution itself.”

TruthScienceCollaborationInstitution
Book:Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
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“And yet—this fascination with the future has generated its own antithesis, particularly in the so-called affluent or developed societies. There is a growing disenchantment with "progress" (however this may be defined) and even a feeling that, in many directions, we have already gone too far.”

ScienceRelevantSpeculative
Book:Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible
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“What constitutes the various species? [...] Here we come up against the perennial question of human thought, which even evolutionism cannot evade: we can only ever consider single, concrete individuals—this dog, and that spruce tree, this grasshopper, and that man. “Humanity” is not something we can see, nor is “catness” or “spruce-ness”. Behind these considerations lies the perennial dispute about “universals”. Is there really such a thing as “humanity”, or are these just “nomina nuda”, as Umberto Eco says in the final sentence of his famous novel The Name of the Rose? Nominalism, which was widespread in the fifteenth century, says that we cannot actually know anything properly. Is there such a thing as “man” as a kind of creature, a species? I have the impression that many scientists do not really like this question because it is too philosophical. It leads us unavoidably into metaphysics. Is there such a thing as a “species”? Are there such things as “beings” at all?”

PhilosophyScienceMetaphysicsMetaphysicalUniversals
Book:Chance or Purpose? Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith
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