[This approach] displays the characteristic philosophical lust to vanquish the skeptic by arguing him out of his skepticism, without appeal to moral and political considerations or to the facts of everyday life. [...] But more often than not, if you give the skeptic everything he wants, then he will be successful in repulsing your attacks and terrorizing your position.

Since we're not very good at something as basic as controlling our reproduction, life is really bad for more people than ever before.

We live in a world in which everyone wants solutions. But we can't find solutions if we don't understand the problems, and we can't understand the problems without knowing how we got here.

The seas will continue to rise no matter who gets elected president.

I became religious and at 14 went to a boarding school 500 miles from home to begin theological studies. By the time I started university, politics had replaced religion in the economy of my enthusiasms but I had no idea what to study. My boarding school emphasized languages which I was bad at, and deemphasized math and science which I was good at.

A great deal of our math, science, philosophy, and everyday behavior presupposes that stability and equilibria are the "default" states, and everything else involves some "perturbation." This is a mental model, a conceptual frame, a tacit belief, a presupposition - whatever you want to call it.

In much of the world today there are no more chilling words than "I'm from the United States and I'm here to help you."