“A church typically told people to trust it because it possessed the ab...” — Yuval Noah Harari Quote

“A church typically told people to trust it because it possessed the absolute truth, in the form of an infallible holy book. A scientific institution, in contrast, gained authority because it had strong self-correcting mechanisms that exposed and rectified the errors of the institution itself. It was these self-correcting mechanisms, not the technology of printing, that were the engine of the scientific revolution. In other words, the scientific revolution was launched by the discovery of ignorance. Religions of the book assumed they had access to an infallible source of knowledge.”

“Populists have sought to extricate themselves from this conundrum in two different ways. Some populist movements claim adherence to the ideals of modern science and to the traditions of skeptical empiricism. They tell people that indeed you should never trust any institutions or figures of authority—including self-proclaimed populist parties and politicians. Instead, you should “do your own research” and trust only what you can directly observe by yourself. This radical empiricist position implies that while large-scale institutions like political parties, courts, newspapers, and universities can never be trusted, individuals who make the effort can still find the truth by themselves.”

“If we are allowed to do experiments on monkeys because we are superior to them in a certain way, then someone who is superior to me is allowed to do experiments on me.”

“Since the beginning of the computer age, there has been immense development in computer intelligence but exactly zero development in computer consciousness.”

“Machine Man faithfully believes that conscious intelligent life came by chance from unconscious, dumb and dead matter that nobody suddenly made out of nothing for no reasons at all.”

“It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.”

“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.”

“Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”

“And, that's what I truly believe that we're doing when we're advancing scientific knowledge is we're someday making the world better. Not only for our children, but for all people after that.”