Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer
Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 70; Rest of first paragraph of Ch.3
[Properties of finite-dimensional groups, Proceedings of the International Mathematical Congress held in Cambridge, Mass. in 1950, 442–446, University of Toronto Press, 1952, http://www.mathunion.org/ICM/ICM1950.2/Main/icm1950.2.0442.0446.ocr.pdf] (quote from p. 442)
Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer
Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 70; Rest of first paragraph of Ch.3
Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist
Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 272-273
Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist
Source: 1930s, Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created “social climates”, 1939, p. 271.
Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American sociologist
Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 209
Nick Land (1962) British philosopher
"Kinds of Killing" https://web.archive.org/web/20121111032625/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1008/kinds-of-killing (2011) (original emphasis)
Ilana Mercer South African writer
“In Defense of Obama’s Apologizing,” http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=551 WorldNetDaily.com, May 21, 2010. <br class="br">2010s, 2010
Charles A. Reich (1928–2019) American lawyer
The Liberals' Mistake (1987)
Context: Liberals placed an unreasonable amount of faith in large institutions: unions, foundations, big government, large corporations, and universities. These institutions are based on principles that are antithetical to democracy. They are not democratic, they are hierarchical: Someone is at the top and everybody else is at the bottom. Their policies are not made democratically, they are made at the top. These institutions are also not egalitarian. They operate by administrative discretion and authority, not the rule of law: There is no legislature, no group lawmaking body.
The individual in the large organization does not have the kind of constitutional rights that an individual in the society at large has. There are no protections of autonomy and free speech. Employees can be fired for many reasons. We need to constitutionalize large organizations to protect the people within them, to ensure that they can be politically outspoken.
Abdullah Ensour (1939) prime minister of Jordan
Jordanian Intelligence forces uncovered and stopped a Daesh plot to target civilians and military in Amman on March 1, 2016, Ensour addressed the parliament on March 2, 2016 on the successful attack on Daesh militants, quoted on Albawaba, "Jordanian authorities confirm Daesh activity in Irbid, suicide belts found" http://www.albawaba.com/news/jordanian-authorities-confirm-daesh-activity-irbid-suicide-belts-found-812292, March 2, 2016.
Robert Trivers (1943) American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist
As quoted in Science at the Edge: Conversations with the Leading Scientific Thinkers of Today (2008), p. 170
Context: People are often unconscious of some of the mechanisms that naturally occur in them in a biased way. For example, if I do something that is beneficial to you or to others, I will use the active voice: I did this, I did that, then benefits rained down on you. But if I did something that harmed others, I unconsciously switch to a passive voice: this happened, then that happened, then unfortunately you suffered these costs. One example I always loved was a man in San Francisco who ran into a telephone pole with his car, and he described it to the police as, "the pole was approaching my car, I attempted to swerve out-of-the-way, when it struck me."
Let me give you another, the way in which group membership can entrain language-usages that are self-deceptive. You can divide people into in-groups or out-groups, or use naturally occurring in-groups and out-groups, and if someone's a member of your in-group and they do something nice, you give a general description of it – "he's a generous person". If they do something negative, you state a particular fact: "in this case he misled me", or something like that. But it's exactly the other way around for an out-group member. If an out-group member does something nice, you give a specific description of it: "she gave me directions to where I wanted to go". But if she does something negative, you say, "she's a selfish person". So these kinds of manipulations of reality are occurring largely unconsciously.
Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist
R. N. Shepard, (1994). "Perceptual-cognitive universals as reflections of the world." Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 1, 2–28.