There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.

Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, "Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living." We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.

An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.

Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow.

My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.

A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.

People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good.