jueves, 29 de octubre de 2020

Ender in Exile (2008) - Orson Scott Card

- Subrayado en la página 104 | Pos. 1594  | Añadido el domingo 9 de agosto de 2020 19H27' GMT+00:00

But I find it quite possible to hate someone and still see their side of the argument between us.
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- Subrayado en la página 132 | Pos. 2014-15  | Añadido el domingo 9 de agosto de 2020 20H51' GMT+00:00

Or is it something in human beings, that when we are overmastered, we rejoice in our subjection? That would explain a lot of history.


 

lunes, 26 de octubre de 2020

Ender's Game (1977) - Orson Scott Card

 Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
- Subrayado en la página 235 | Pos. 3591-93  | Añadido el viernes 7 de agosto de 2020 13H08' GMT+00:00

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.

martes, 13 de octubre de 2020

The word for the world is forest - Ursula K Leguin


 The Word for World Is Forest (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Subrayado en la página 73 | Pos. 1116-17  | Añadido el sábado 25 de julio de 2020 15H05' GMT+00:00

Touch was a main channel of communication among the forest people. Among Terrans touch is always likely to imply threat, aggression, and so for them there is often nothing between the formal handshake and the sexual caress.

domingo, 27 de septiembre de 2020

Ancestral night - Elizabeth Bear [White Space 1]

Ancestral Night (Elizabeth Bear)

- Subrayado en la página 369 | Pos. 5653-56  | Añadido el miércoles 8 de julio de 2020 17H33' GMT+00:00

I said, “Busywork, they used to call it. There’s absolutely no value to it. Economic value, or personal. There’s value in work you enjoy, or that serves a need. There’s no value in work for its own sake. It’s just . . . churn. Anxiety. Doing stuff to be doing stuff, not because it needs doing. There’s enough for everybody.”

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Ancestral Night (Elizabeth Bear)

- Subrayado en la página 515 | Pos. 7890-91  | Añadido el jueves 9 de julio de 2020 15H33' GMT+00:00

We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A long, exhausting process. A series of choices that we have to make over, and over, and over again.

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jueves, 14 de mayo de 2020

21 Lessons for the 21st Century [Yuval Noah Harari]


- Subrayado en la página 28 | Pos. 422  | Añadido el domingo 26 de abril de 2020 13H11' GMT+00:00

Vaunted ‘human intuition’ is in reality ‘pattern recognition’.
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- Subrayado en la página 28 | Pos. 421-22  | Añadido el domingo 26 de abril de 2020 13H11' GMT+00:00

It turned out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will, but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Vaunted ‘human intuition’ is in reality ‘pattern recognition’.
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- Subrayado en la página 32 | Pos. 484-85  | Añadido el domingo 26 de abril de 2020 13H26' GMT+00:00

Hence it would be madness to block automation in fields such as transport and healthcare just in order to protect human jobs. After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans – not jobs.
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- Subrayado en la página 56 | Pos. 845-48  | Añadido el miércoles 29 de abril de 2020 19H39' GMT+00:00

We usually fail to realise that feelings are in fact calculations, because the rapid process of calculation occurs far below our threshold of awareness. We don’t feel the millions of neurons in the brain computing probabilities of survival and reproduction, so we erroneously believe that our fear of snakes, our choice of sexual mates, or our opinions about the European Union are the result of some mysterious ‘free will’.
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- Subrayado en la página 154 | Pos. 2360-62  | Añadido el viernes 1 de mayo de 2020 15H57' GMT+00:00

Both these cases may seem to smack of racism. But in fact, they are not racist. They are ‘culturist’. People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against traditional racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted. Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of ‘culturists’.
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- Subrayado en la página 216 | Pos. 3309-11  | Añadido el domingo 3 de mayo de 2020 14H18' GMT+00:00

is what Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach have termed ‘the knowledge illusion’. We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.
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- Subrayado en la página 217 | Pos. 3322-24  | Añadido el domingo 3 de mayo de 2020 14H21' GMT+00:00

Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid.
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- Subrayado en la página 224 | Pos. 3420-22  | Añadido el domingo 3 de mayo de 2020 14H41' GMT+00:00

in a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know. The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference.
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- Subrayado en la página 247 | Pos. 3776-78  | Añadido el domingo 3 de mayo de 2020 15H43' GMT+00:00

Have you any idea how many movies, novels and poems you have consumed over the years, and how these artefacts have carved and sharpened your idea of love? Romantic comedies are to love as porn is to sex and Rambo is to war. And if you think you can press some delete button and wipe out all trace of Hollywood from your subconscious and your limbic system, you are deluding yourself.
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- Subrayado en la página 278 | Pos. 4258-60  | Añadido el jueves 7 de mayo de 2020 02H20' GMT+00:00

In the minds of the illiterate peasants, who did not speak Latin, ‘Hoc est corpus!’ got garbled into ‘Hocus pocus!’ and thus was born the powerful spell that can transform a frog into a prince, and a pumpkin into a carriage.
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- Subrayado en la página 287 | Pos. 4399-4400  | Añadido el miércoles 13 de mayo de 2020 23H16' GMT+00:00

Fascism insisted that people should not believe any story except the nationalist story, and should have no identity except their national identity.
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- Subrayado en la página 297 | Pos. 4554-55  | Añadido el miércoles 13 de mayo de 2020 23H50' GMT+00:00

It is particularly noteworthy that our fantasy self tends to be very visual, whereas our actual experiences are corporeal.
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- Subrayado en la página 299 | Pos. 4582-87  | Añadido el miércoles 13 de mayo de 2020 23H56' GMT+00:00

you will never encounter something that does not change, that has an eternal essence, and that completely satisfies you. Suffering emerges because people fail to appreciate this. They believe that there is some eternal essence somewhere, and if they can only find it and connect to it, they will be completely satisfied. This eternal essence is sometimes called God, sometimes the nation, sometimes the soul, sometimes the authentic self, and sometimes true love – and the more people are attached to it, the more disappointed and miserable they become due to the failure to find it.
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- Subrayado en la página 300 | Pos. 4596-99  | Añadido el miércoles 13 de mayo de 2020 23H58' GMT+00:00

Then the epic starts expanding, and people embark on a quest not just to liberate themselves from their own attachments, but also to convince others to do so. Having accepted that life has no meaning, I find meaning in explaining this truth to others, arguing with the unbelievers, giving lectures to the sceptics, donating money to build monasteries, and so on. ‘No story’ can all too easily become just another story.
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- Subrayado en la página 309 | Pos. 4738-40  | Añadido el jueves 14 de mayo de 2020 14H07' GMT+00:00

Many people, including many scientists, tend to confuse the mind with the brain, but they are really very different things. The brain is a material network of neurons, synapses and biochemicals. The mind is a flow of subjective experiences, such as pain, pleasure, anger and love. Biologists assume that the brain somehow produces the mind,
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lunes, 20 de abril de 2020

Vortex - robert charles wilson [Spin #3]

- Subrayado en la página 298 | Pos. 4562-65  | Añadido el domingo 19 de abril de 2020 22H36' GMT+00:00

Agency—that is, volitional action aimed at achieving conscious ends—had arisen only sporadically in the galaxy, mostly in the climax ecologies of biologically active planets orbiting hospitable stars. Species capable of agency seldom lasted longer than it took them to overload and overwhelm their planetary ecologies. They were, as the stars measure time, an unstable and ephemeral phenomenon.
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