Writing can be taken up at any point. But you need to remember that the arts are fundamentally unfair. Hard work and diligence won't necessarily take you all the way. Talent, nepotism, influence, and pure luck play a huge part.
David BrinRead
When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.
Interpretation
People tend to prioritize their own privacy while expecting others to be held accountable.
David Brin's quote reflects the inherent human tendency to seek personal privacy while simultaneously desiring transparency and accountability from others. This duality highlights a common conflict in social behavior, where individuals focus on their own interests and rights yet criticize similar behaviors in others, pointing to the complexities of societal norms regarding privacy and accountability.
In practice
In a discussion about social media ethics, this quote can highlight the hypocrisy in privacy expectations.
Writing can be taken up at any point. But you need to remember that the arts are fundamentally unfair. Hard work and diligence won't necessarily take you all the way. Talent, nepotism, influence, and pure luck play a huge part.
There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.
Competition, by itself, always leads to cheating by the powerful, who try to establish pyramids of power, like feudalism. Yet, competition is the great creative force! So how do we save it from its own contradictions? By cooperation! By cooperating with each other, via politics, to make rules and prevent cheating, so that competition can thrive!
Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.
Human beings are inherently misled into subjective fantasies, but there's a saving grace. We all have different delusions. Other people don't necessarily share yours, and hence they will help you penetrate yours through the miracle of criticism!
Evangelicalism has taken the Extrovert Ideal to its logical extreme...If you don't love Jesus out loud, then it must not be real love. It's not enough to forge your own spiritual connection to the divine; it must be displayed publicly.
Tolerance once meant that we could use our reason to discern good and evil in open debate. Today tolerance has been used to call good evil and evil good.
Spiritual life can certainly follow the pattern one sees in the fake martial arts, with most teachers making nebulous and magical claims that never get tested, while their students derange themselves with weird ideas, empty rituals, and other affectations.
My favorite: Spirituality is a domain of awareness.
It is greater than the stars - that moving procession of human energy; greater than the palpitating earth and the things growing thereon.
Ultimately we want to use dream to liberate ourselves from all relative conditions, not simply to improve them.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.