We all have brains and we're all really smart people, but the underlying reality is that we're really just animals and sometimes animal instinct takes over your capability to really think things through.
Some PhD physicists write software or work for hedge funds, but physics still has a problem with having very smart people but not enough opportunities.
When I was trying to figure out why lives have improved so much in the last 300 years, where we've gone from a third of kids dying before 5 to - by 1990 it was down to 10% - now it's down to 5%. And saying why, over all history, there were smart people, but that number didn't change. Average life span didn't change. What's magical about what's been deemed the Industrial Revolution? It's really energy intensity.
Smart people make good choices. They dig science and say 'no' to the invasion of sovereign nations for the pleasure of corporations.
I kind of like social media, and I like hearing from people. I don't like the ugly stuff, but there are some people - smart people - who have a very different perspective, and I'll get a backlash from them. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I know is that the response [for Difficult People ] has been really great. I think it's for smart people. I think it's for people who obviously care about pop culture or know about it, even if it's to a fault. I think it's for outsiders.
If just a few people make decisions about what this world looks like, what this country looks like, then you have people sitting in offices at major media outlets and Hollywood who think they can deal with a small group of people, to get them to jump through the hoops they want you to.
Smart people instinctively understand the dangers of entrusting our future to self-serving leaders who use our institutions, whether in the corporate or social sectors, to advance their own interests.
I love trade. I'm a free trader, 100 percent. But we [the USA] need smart people making the deals, and we don't have smart people making the deals.
The world is a big place. There are lots of smart people in it. Entrepreneurs are kidding themselves if they think they have any kind of monopoly on knowledge. And, sure as I'm a Macintosh user, on the same day that an entrepreneur tells this lie, the venture capitalist will have met with another company that's doing the same thing.
Don't expect smart people to listen to you without proof.
Too, some of my teachers helped me to navigate those books, showed me the maps and paths and secret decoder rings - people like Linda Kintz and Forest Pyle and Mary Wood and Diana Abu Jaber. They didn't treat me like a messy writer girl in combat boots who had infiltrated the smart people room. They treated me like I deserved to be there, potty mouth and all, they helped make a space for me to rage and ride my own intellect. That's why I'm saying their names out loud.
The investigation of consciousness has come to be regarded suspiciously by most smart people and by most scientists. That's a legacy that began with the Inquisition, which considered non-Christian spiritual inquiry as blasphemous.
Stupid people surround themselves with smart people. Smart people surround themselves with smart people who disagree with them.
Smart people sometimes get stupid, but stupid people never get smart. Never. Ever. 'You can come down the evolutionary ladder,' Chon has observed to Ben and O; 'you can't climb up.
Whether or not Twitter makes you stupid, it certainly makes some smart people sound stupid.
Stupid people go to college but"smart people own them".
You can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at.
Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.
My father and mother are both very smart people and I always felt I was a little short of the mark. So I would compensate with a character like Logan Cale. He's wearing glasses, he's in a wheelchair, he's a computer genius. He's very far away from who I am, but I really wanted to play roles where I'd be taken seriously.
Writing is not something you can do or you can't. It's not even something that 'other people do' or 'for smart people only' or even 'for people who finished school and went to University'. Nonsense. Anyone can do it. But no-one can do it straight off the bat. Like plastering, brain surgery or assembling truck engines, you have to do a bit of training - get your hands dirty - and make some mistakes.
All you need do is listen to very smart people and sift out the ideas that are unworthy or implausible, and I wouldn't pretend for a moment that I hadn't made lots of mistakes and there are companies, perhaps, that we had been investors in.
Socially smart people have always mocked the threateningly mobile, and anti-branding is a central strand of high-end status conflict now.
I love people, 'cause people are so smart. People have done a lot of great things.
The smart people who are straight are involved in simply the media management of what has turned into a slow apocalypse, spreading starvation, exacerbated class differences, toxified agriculture, so forth and so on. I don't believe the Establishment thinks there are solutions. Their policy is basically the management of panic, which is hardly a forward moving approach to the adventure of human civilization.
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