In “Anatomy of Fascism,” Robert Paxton includes in his concise definition “the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external.
But evil does not die, just as history does not end. Like a weed, evil can be cut back but never entirely uprooted. It waits for its chance to spread through the cracks in our vigilance. It can take root in the fertile soil of our complacency, or even the rocky rubble of the fallen Berlin Wall.
Dictatorships must be feared to survive so they cannot bear to be mocked.
Repression may begin as a means to an end, but it always ends up being an end unto itself.
The method you employ to achieve success is a secret because it can be discovered only by you analyzing your own decisions. This is what my questioners should really have been asking me about instead of my trivial habits: How did I push myself? What questions did I ask myself? How did I investigate and understand my strengths and weaknesses? And how did I use what I learned to get better and further define and hone my method?
But the worries about operatorless elevators were quite similar to the concerns we hear today about driverless cars.
I’m a firm a believer in the power of free enterprise to move the world forward. All that Soviet respect for science was no match for the American innovation machine once unleashed. The problem comes when the government is inhibiting innovation with overregulation and short-sighted policy. Trade wars and restrictive immigration regulations will limit America’s ability to attract the best and brightest minds, minds needed for this and every forthcoming Sputnik moment.
It is not what a government does with data that defines it; it is what it does to human beings.
Big branches in the decision tree require extra caution. These are the forks in the road that leave us with no way back.
One comforting thing about the Trump White House is that you aren’t forced to choose between malice and incompetence.
Russia was allowed to inherit the Soviet Union’s seat on the UN Security Council when that organization, which had been designed to preserve the Cold War status quo, should instead have been reformed to reflect the new primacy of the free world.
The Putin regime is and always has been about one thing: money. Specifically, about how to move it into the bank accounts of Putin’s.
Telling Ukrainians they provoked Putin by rejecting him and moving toward Europe is like telling a harassed woman she should wear longer skirts. Do not lose sight of who is the offender and who is the victim!
In a 1959 speech in Indianapolis, John F. Kennedy famously observed that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters, one meaning danger and the other meaning opportunity. It turns out that this is not literally true.
I used to attack because it was the only thing I knew. Now I attack because I know it works.
Deep Blue was intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.
As one Google Translate engineer put it, “when you go from 10,000 training examples to 10 billion training examples, it all starts to work. Data trumps everything.
Why settle for thinking like a human if you can be a god.
Today our society places great emphasis on specialization and focus. Students used to go off to university with the idea of broadening themselves; now it has become a mostly vocational experience. Students use higher education as a means to develop a skill that will make them attractive to employers. We place so much emphasis on being good at what we do that we fail to realize that getting better at what we do might be best achieved by getting better at other – and wildly different – things.
To become good at anything you have to know how to apply basic principles. To become great at it, you have to know when to violate those principles. This isn’t only a theory; it’s also the story of my own battles against chess machines over two decades.