Wandering Wandering Star

‘Do we know the answers to the most important questions in our lives?

Should you buy a particular house? What mortgage product should you have? Should you buy a particular car? Who should you marry? What sort of job should you take? What kind of activities should you do? What kind of holidays should you take? We don’t know the answers to most of those things. And if we really were the deeply intelligent and imaginative and innovative species that we thought we were, we might know the answers to those things…

And if we ask ourselves how it is we come across the answers, or acquire the answers to many of those questions, most of us realize that we do what everybody else is doing….

…our capacity for social learning, which is responsible for all of our cumulative cultural adaptation, all of the things we see around us in our everyday lives, has actually promoted a species that isn’t so good at innovation…maybe we’re not as creative and as imaginative and as innovative as we thought we were, but extraordinarily good at copying and following.

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,“ Hammerbacher says. "That sucks.”

Nabokov, in one of his many smart and crabby lectures, said that the only important organ for evaluating an artist is the stretch of flesh between the shoulder-blades.

“That little shiver,” he said, “is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained.”

Taste doesn’t work for reason; reason is a skinny underpaid clerk in the office of taste.