Top 293 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Researchers - Page 3

What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere.

If I can see it, it's a failure

[T]he Swiss people are the best practitioners of the ideals of non-aggression. The Swiss national government posts are parttime positions. Most decisions are made at the canton (state) level. Swiss per capita income is the highest in the world, showing that non-aggression pays. How did the Swiss come to adopt a relatively non-aggressive constitution in an aggressive world? In the mid-1800s, they imitated our constitution and stuck with it!

The security of computers and the Internet is a horrible and dangerous mess. Every week we hear about breaches of databases of Social Security numbers and financial information and health records, and about critical infrastructure being insecure.

The objective psychologist, hoping to get at the physiological side of behavior, is apt to plunge immediately into neurology trying to correlate brain activity with modes of experience ... The result in many cases only accentuates the gap between the total experience as studied by the psychologist and neural activity as analyzed by the neurologist.

It is difficult to imagine a greater imposition than adding genes to future generations that changes the nature of future people.

There is, even today, a Flat Earth Society that meets every year to say the Earth is flat. The science about climate change is very clear. There really is no room for doubt at this point.

Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.

I do sense that the financial system is under the gun. In order to keep our system and economies moving globally, there's the need to extend new money.

Physicists dream of Nobel prizes, engineers dream of mishaps.

Whether hunting is right or wrong, a spiritual experience, or an outlet for the killer instinct, one thing it is not is a sport.

The people working in my field also are quite skeptical of our ability to do this. It ultimately boils down to the problem of building complex systems that are reliable and that work, and that problem has long predated the problem of access to encryption keys.

Intelligence is ten million rules.

Abraham Lincoln was the father of a nation and had enormous beliefs that stood well.

If you want toget the most outof a sketch, youneed to leave bigenough holes forthe imaginationto fit in.

If the layman cannot participate in decision making, he will have to turn himself over, essentially blind, to a hermetic elite. ... [The fundamental question becomes] are we still capable of self-government and therefore freedom? Margaret Mead wrote in a 1959 issue of Daedalus about scientists elevated to the status of priests. Now there is a name for this elevation, when you are in the hands of-one hopes-a benevolent elite, when you have no control over your political decisions. From the point of view of John Locke, the name for this is slavery.

The universe looks less like a big machine than a big thought.

Can you avoid knowledge? You cannot! Can you avoid technology? You cannot! Things are going to go ahead in spite of ethics, in spite of your personal beliefs, in spite of everything.

Maintaining an open mind is essential when exploring the unknown, but allowing one's brains to fall out in the process is inadvisable.

As the sphere of understanding grows ever larger, necessarily the surface area of ignorance gets ever bigger

LinkedIn is very good for browsing relationships and hooking into your contacts' networks. It re-connected me with high-level execs I hadn't talked to for some time, who then helped me close various deals.

People often find it easier to refute a fake extreme opponent than a more cautious real one, so they knock down the straw man instead. It is actually worth the trouble to identify the invalid forms of argument, and to learn their names. Not only can you then avoid them yourself; you can also identify them in opponents. If you call your opponent's errors by their Latin names, you can make it look as though he or she is suffering from a rare tropical disease.

Working memory capacity is really the ability to hold and manipulate information while you're actively trying to block out distraction.

Teaching...can be likened to a conversation in which you listen to the speaker carefully before you reply.

Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electrical stimulation of the brain.

Digital mechanics predicts that for every continuous symmetry of physics there will be some microscopic process that violates that symmetry.

In the late 1980s, Soviets were allowed to keep the wealth they created by raising vegetables on their garden plots. Although these plots composed only about 2% of the agricultural lands in the Soviet Union, they produced 25% of the food! When Soviets kept the wealth they created, they produced almost 16 times more than when it was taken from them at gunpoint, if necessary!

To this day, we see all around us the Promethean drive to omnipotence through technology and to omniscience through science. The effecting of all things possible and the knowledge of all causes are the respective primary imperatives of technology and of science. But the motivating imperative of society continues to be the very different one of its physical and spiritual survival. It is now far less obvious than it was in Francis Bacon's world how to bring the three imperatives into harmony, and how to bring all three together to bear on problems where they superpose.

There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state, that which happens when you don't do anything. If you want to experience poverty, just do nothing, and it will come…. We should ask what are the causes of wealth and try to recreate and reproduce them.

True healing must come first at the Soul level... prayer aligns our souls with God... By aligning ourselves with God - this highest possible state of unconditional love, joy, and wholeness - we can overcome anything, be healed of all afflictions.

Climate change: It's here. If we don't react, war, pestilence and famine will follow close behind

Derek Bok's most recent book, Our Underachieving Colleges, is worth scrutinizing. . . . Bok is . . . on solid ground in pointing out that our colleges underachieve in preparing students for citizenship.

If it were possible to hold onto this sort of database and really be assured that only good guys get access to it, we might have a different discussion. Unfortunately, we don't know how to build systems that work that way. We don't know how to do this without creating a big target and a big vulnerability.

Children who willingly participate in sexual acts have the right to make that decision as well, even if it's distasteful to us personally. Some children will make poor choices just as some adults do in smoking and drinking to excess; this is part of life. When we outlaw child pornography, the prices paid for child performers rise, increasing the incentives for parents to use children against their will.

I'm proposing … that we reach into our bodies and we grab the genotype, and we reach into the medical system and we grab our records, and we use it to build something together.

Once you have a truly massive amount of information integrated as knowledge, then the human-software system will be superhuman, in the same sense that mankind with writing is superhuman compared to mankind before writing.

The Internet is not a thing, a place, a single technology, or a mode of governance. It is an agreement.

No amount of study of present forms [of life] would permit us to infer [the existence of] dinosaurs

There is no greater prediction in the research of our levels of happiness than the breadth and depth of our relationships.

The main theme to emerge... is that there appear to be two modes of thinking, verbal and nonverbal, represented rather separately in left and right hemispheres respectively and that our education system, as well as science in general, tends to neglect the nonverbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere.

Think for yourself, and believe in yourself. Keep your skeptical antennae tuned in and in good working order at all times. We are free to develop our own hypotheses, which should be based in available evidence. When it comes to faith, have faith in yourself. And don't forget to love, laugh, be kind to each other. Don't take things so seriously, especially yourself. If the universe is a cosmic joke, remember to giggle. And remember to be astonished.

The greatest performance improvement of all is when a system goes from not-working to working.

Social comparison that leads to unhappiness is the downside of social media.

Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being.

I think that our experiences are quite often colored by our cultural and religious beliefs.

Chris Anderson is a computer-fabricated artifact.

The books of the great scientists are gathering dust on the shelves of learned libraries. And rightly so. The scientist addresses an infinitesimal audience of fellow composers. His message is not devoid of universality but its universality is disembodied and anonymous. While the artist's communication is linked forever with its original form, that of the scientist is modified, amplified, fused with the ideas and results of others and melts into the stream of knowledge and ideas which forms our culture. The scientist has in common with the artist only this: that he can find no better retreat from the world than his work and also no stronger link with the world than his work.

You monkeys only think you're running things.

Neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both.

Business culture operates differently in different cities around the world. But I don't think it's possible to design one system that incorporates all social norms for networking. Human beings are just too diverse.

Too quickly, venting can turn into dumping garbage on the people around us.

And I love the people there. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are cool. But I'm terrified of the next generation that takes over. A benevolent dictatorship is still a dictatorship. At some point people are going to realize that Google has everything on everyone. Most of all, they can see what questions you're asking, in real time. Quite literally, they can read your mind.

In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side-by-side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

When we outlaw child pornography, the prices paid for child performers rise, increasing the incentives for parents to use children against their will.

Unless a price can be put on carbon emissions that is high enough to force power companies and manufacturers to reduce their fossil-fuel use, there seems to be little chance of avoiding hugely damaging temperature increases

The new way of thinking, spawned by the cognitive revolution, shows strong promise. Reversing previous doctrine in science, the new paradigm affirms that the world we live in is driven not solely by mindless physical forces but, more crucially, by subjective human values. Human values become the underlying key to world change.

I think that it is very good for people to talk about their paranormal experiences and share stories about things that they cannot explain.

The IPCC doesn't do any research itself. We only develop our assessments on the basis of peer-reviewed literature.

If history is any indication, we should assume that any technology that is going to have a significant impact over the next 10 years is already 10 years old!

Everyone is psychic to some degree, and really successful paranormal investigators even if they do not realize it are using their own psychic ability to sense the environment.