Black Friday came early this year. Until Monday, December 1, all titles at infinitebooks.com are 25% off with checkout code BFCM2025. Don’t miss our best prices of the year!
Perfect timing: Tinkered Thinking, author of White Mirror (included in the sale), just appeared on Lux Capital’s The Orthogonal Bet podcast with host Samuel Arbesman (a previous Infinite Loops guest), to discuss the book and more:
In this episode, Samuel Arbesman speaks with Tinkered Thinking about the origins of these stories and his broader evolution as a writer, including his shift from a kind of Luddism toward a more forward-looking view of technological progress. Their conversation ranges across how we examine ideas about the future, societal blind spots around technology, the impact and importance of AI, concerns about AI doomers, and the kind of future he hopes we might create.
Watch or listen: X | YouTube | RSS | Substack. Enjoy!
Sunday, 9 November
Two thoughts from Daniel Gilbert
“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished...The one constant in our lives is change.”
“People are drastically overconfident about their judgments of others.”
Monday, 10 November
Two thoughts from Trevor Blake
“We must change our thoughts from being against things we don’t want to being for things we do want.”
“Fear paralyzes. It works better than any other emotion to keep us entranced long enough for whatever message they have.”
Tuesday, 11 November
Two thoughts from Kate Atkinson
“The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.”
“In the endgame a pawn can change into a queen.”
Wednesday, 12 November
Two thoughts from Tana French
“Frightened people are obedient–not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally.”
“If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that’s fine; you only need to get it right once.”
Thursday, 13 November
Two thoughts from Tara Westover
“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.”
“An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.”
Friday, 14 November
Two thoughts from David Hackett Fischer
“The only mistake we can make about the past is to consider it superior to the present.”
“It was typical of Washington’s style of leadership to present a promising proposal as someone else’s idea, rather than his own.”
Saturday, 15 November
Two thoughts from Mark Booth
“Whole dimensions lie glistening on the dark side of even the most dull and commonplace thought.”
“The unlucky fact that our current mechanistic materialism rests on muddled, outdated notions of matter isn’t often mentioned today.”
Follow Jim on Twitter for a daily dose of Two Thoughts!
Well, it ought to be. But I'm not sure I can say that contemporary education even let's someone make a living these days, far less a person. I think back how fortunate I was to have an outstanding critical-thinking based course in high school, well before I could understand what its use in life would be. The making of a person seems quite lost now, with the only institutions that have tremendous + well-funded access to the shaping of children are tech companies and content-producers, trading what they want to see vs their attention and some influence. This is the battlefield we are raising children in now, and we need to update our advice and mentoring so they understand where the bullets are flying from. Otherwise, they are abandoned.
“An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.”
Dear Jim,
Great batch of quotes this week! Some of my faves:
Daniel Gilbert:
“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished...The one constant in our lives is change.”
Trevor Blake:
“We must change our thoughts from being against things we don’t want to being for things we do want.”
Kate Atkinson:
“The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.”
Tana French:
“If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that’s fine; you only need to get it right once.”
Tara Westover:
“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.”
“An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.”
David Hackett Fischer:
“The only mistake we can make about the past is to consider it superior to the present.”
Thank you for sharing as always!
Love
Myq