“We find things that do not fit into familiar frameworks hard to understand – such things seem meaningless.”

— Marvin Minsky

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

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Marvin Minsky 65

American cognitive scientist 1927–2016

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (1953) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: a responsibility-driven approach (1989), p. 13

“People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.”

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand

“A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

“New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

The Life of Pope
Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)

“We have found a method of creating an order of human co–operation which far exceeds the limits of our knowledge. We are led to do things by circumstances of which we are largely unaware. We do not know the needs which we satisfy, nor do we know the sources of the things which we get. We stand in an enormous framework into which we fit ourselves by obeying certain rules of conduct that we have never made and never understood, but which have their reason.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1980s and later, Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983), "Coping with Ignorance", "Our Moral Heritage"

“The right thing to do and the hard thing to do are usually the same thing.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 61

“It has always seemed to me that the hard thing to understand is not quantum mechanics, but where classical mechanics comes from (in the sense of how it emerges from a “measurement”).”

Peter Woit (1957) American physicist

Not Even Wrong (blog)

“I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Letter to Robert Fulford, 1964. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 300
1960s
Context: My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

“We all want to fit into a culture, a community; we want to find a home, security, freedom of faith and lifestyle but these days all those things are threatened.”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

Beating the drums of hope and faith (2004)
Context: We all want to fit into a culture, a community; we want to find a home, security, freedom of faith and lifestyle but these days all those things are threatened. We don’t know whether the "freedom" in our western democracies means "free of domination" or "free to dominate". Muslim youth are confused and searching for answers. Some are looking towards rigid traditionalism, others to more secular approaches. Many of us are left wondering what is right and what is wrong.

“You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

“We find things that do not fit into familiar frameworks hard to understand – such things seem meaningless.”

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Marvin Minsky 65

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