When we are headed the wrong way, the last thing we need is progress.
Interpretation
This quote highlights that advancing on a misguided path is futile; sometimes, we need to reassess our direction rather than push forward.
Nick Bostrom emphasizes that making progress while moving in the wrong direction can lead to greater problems. It’s essential to pause and evaluate our choices instead of merely pursuing progress, as true success stems from being on the right path before accelerating forward.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the importance of reevaluating our goals and directions in life.
Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.
Are you living in a computer simulation?
For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.
If you're the village blacksmith and a model T comes along, you better become a mechanic. People's lives are better when they get news online versus having to wait for the morning paper. It's a lot more efficient, a lot more real time, a lot less waste.
Some day we hope to liberate every man on earth from the tendency as old as human history to identify our strength and manhood with the ability to control the lives, limit the chances, and doom the dreams of women and girls.
One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.
The power of effecting changes for the better is within ourselves, not in the favorableness of circumstances.
Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence. I hear the roar of women’s silence. I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt.
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