A Quote by Noam Chomsky

The whole intelectual culture has a filtering system, starts as a child in school. You're expected to accept certain beliefs, styles, behavioral patterns and so on. If you don't accept them, you are called maybe a behavioral problem, or something, and you're weeded out. Something like that goes on all the way through universities and graduate schools. There is an implicit system of filtering, which has the, it creates a strong tendency to impose conformism. Now, it's a tendency, so you do have exceptions, and sometimes the exceptions are quite striking.
The function of high school, then, is not so much to communicate knowledge as to oblige children finally to accept the grading system as a measure of their inner excellence. And a function of the self-destructive process in American children is to make them willing to accept not their own, but a variety of other standards, like a grading system, for measuring themselves. It is thus apparent that the way American culture is now integrated it would fall apart if it did not engender feelings of inferiority and worthlessness.
Basically the school system sets you up with what it wants to set you up with. They're really good at it. I think they're too good. Problem is, what they're doing is conditioning kids to merely accept the culture at hand. But the rebels won't accept it.
System theorists know that it's easy to couple simple-to-understand systems into a "super system" that's capable of displaying behavioral modes that cannot be seen in any of its constituent parts. This is the process called "emergence."
One of the things we did at PayPal was collaborative filtering and machine learning: looking at patterns of human behavior. We used it there to predict when people would try to cheat the system to get money. But you can predict pretty much any behavior with a certain amount of accuracy.
Any kind of expectation creates a problem. We should accept, but not expect. Whatever comes, accept it. Whatever goes, accept it. The immediate benefit is that your mind is always peaceful.
For me, DJ culture - with its obsession with collecting records and archiving everything - predated the "cloud" concept with primitive material like the mixtape. Now we would call it "collaborative filtering" or something technical, but the impulse is the same - gather fragments, make something new. That is how you will bypass the climate-change skeptics: render them totally obsolete.
An example is ObamaCare, which is now embattled in the Senate. If that goes through the way [Barack] Obama wants, we will have something very much like the British system.
It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their schools, by their schools where they're graduate students, and that does become exploitative eventually because they're very cheap labor and there's a way in which in it's not in the institution's interest to give them a degree if they can continue to employ them, I don't think anybody thinks that way, but effectively that's the way the system is starting to work.
It's very difficult in our society. You cannot impose certain behavioral changes. Education can do it at the right time, probably by high school. After that it is too late.
Its very difficult in our society. You cannot impose certain behavioral changes. Education can do it at the right time, probably by high school. After that it is too late.
I came to nonfiction through journalism. My first book was journalism, and it was so frustrating to me, while I was writing it, that I wasn't capturing the moments the way they were when I lived them; I was filtering and re-filtering. I had to come to terms with the fact that I couldn't and shouldn't claim authenticity. Then, when the book was published and I gave readings, I'd hear myself read and it was like I was eavesdropping on a dream - even with myself as the narrator. I knew that guy but couldn't exactly recognize him.
Retirement savings is probably behavioral economists' greatest success story. It is a prototypical behavioral-economics problem because saving for retirement is cognitively hard - figuring out how much to save - and requires self-control.
Faith is a kind of immune system filtering out fears that otherwise would paralyze all activity.
And the bottom line is we are who we are-we look a certain way, we talk a certain way, we walk a certain way. I strut because I’m a supermodel, and sometimes I gallop for fun. When we learn to accept that, other people learn to accept us. So be who you really are. Embrace who you are. Literally. Hug yourself. Accept who you are. Unless you’re a serial killer.
I love working with women. I think they're beautiful. I like to photograph them. I like the way they interact. When I was in high school I used to hang out with the girls. When I went to graduate school, I was in an all girls school. So it's something I'm very familiar with and quite fascinated by.
I think violence can never be justified. At the same time, nobody’s culture or beliefs should be insulted, that’s not something I can accept either. But I cannot justify or accept any violence at all.
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