Gary Wolf Quotes

18 quotes in 379 categories

• Steve Jobs has been right twice. The first time we got Apple. The second time we got NeXT. The Macintosh ruled. NeXT tanked. Still, Jobs…
• The intersection of political analysis and Internet theory is a busy crossroad of cliche, where familiar rhetorical vehicles - decentralized authority, emergent leadership, empowered grass…
• Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward…
• As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory…
• Craigslist is not only gigantic in scale and totally resistant to business cooperation, it is also mostly free.
• Every day the choristers of the social web chirp their advice about openness and trust; craigslist follows none of it, and every day it grows.
• The history of using mice to stand in for humans in medical experiments is replete with failures.
• Our experience in fooling around with the genes of mice has taught us that many of the traits that interest us are not definite products…
• The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great…
• Books are an ancient and proven medium. Their physical form inspires passion.
• Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a…
• Human attention is limited, and a massive number of newly browsable books from the long tail necessarily compete with the biggest best-sellers, just as cable…
• Being a 911 operator means balancing seemingly contradictory skills. On one hand, operators have to be fanatically precise and well-organized. On the other, they must…
• If national safety - the ability to respond to hurricanes, terrorist attacks, earthquakes - depends on the execution of explicit plans, on soldierly obedience, and…
• For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People…
• Millions of us track ourselves all the time. We step on a scale and record our weight. We balance a checkbook. We count calories. But…
• The idea that our mental life is affected by hidden causes is a mainstay of psychology.
• The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass. So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have…

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