Behavior Quotes - page 57
[Y]ou can affect a lot of people with a small amount of information. Therefore, you can change the behavior of many people with a small amount of information. The question then arises as to what kinds of information will produce behavior which is just and disincentivize behavior which is unjust.
Julian Assange
The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. "Art" when it is opposed to "Science" is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience. In the northern European cultures the romantic mode is usually associated with femininity, but this is certainly not a necessary association.
The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws-which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. In the European cultures it is primarily a masculine mode and the fields of science, law and medicine are unattractive to women largely for this reason. Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
Robert M. Pirsig
Pacifism goes hand in hand with efforts to centralize and control the movement. The concept is inherently authoritarian and incompatible with anarchism because it denies people the right to self-determination in directing their own struggles. The pacifist reliance on centralization and control (with a leadership that can take "vigorous efforts” to "prevent destructive behavior”) preserves the state within the movement, and preserves hierarchical structures to assist state negotiations (and state repression).
Peter Gelderloos
What the hell is this?? Who can tell me?? Does anybody know?? How can I find out more about it?? One thing's sure: the human mind can't "know" it...why does one want to "know"?? Is it a quest for "freedom"? One no longer wishes to be a puppet dancing on the strings of...of what? Animal instincts?? Learned reflexes? Programmed behavior?? Ingrained habits of perception?? How limited are we by the experience of our senses, by our physical nature?? To be fully alive is a stupendous struggle! We want the rewards without the struggle--- ---a fatal error! ...No such thing as an easy life! Everybody has a hard time...struggle or die! To find out what's really going on it's necessary to get around the ego..an art requiring persistent and determined effort...Me, me, me...myself & I...oh no!!! Trapped in my stupid self!
Robert Crumb
The theater chose me. As I said, I started with poetry, and I also wrote criticism and dialogue. But I realized that I was most successful at dialogue. Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language, but in their behavior as well.
Eugène Ionesco
Barack Obama's naïve, almost schoolyard-level attitude toward international politics is on display again today, as he says the US needs to set a better example for Russia: Obama: Russia, U.S. should not ‘charge into' other countries. This is normal "progressive" thinking, and you find these bizarre assumptions everywhere in leftist circles: if we just achieve some noble ideal of behavior, that alone will be enough to usher in a new era of peace and global good will - and in the meantime, it's important to let our adversaries know that we're not perfect and we understand their feelings.
Charles Foster Johnson
In our hearing tonight, you saw an American president faced with a stark, unmistakable choice between right and wrong. There was no ambiguity, no nuance. Donald Trump made a purposeful choice to violate his oath of office, to ignore the ongoing violence against law enforcement, to threaten our Constitutional order. There is no way to excuse that behavior. It was indefensible.
And every American must consider this: Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of January 6th ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?
Elizabeth Cheney
The centerpiece of the cultural counterrevolution is the snowballing campaign for a "drug-free workplace" - a euphemism for "drug-free workforce," since urine testing also picks up for off-duty indulgence. The purpose of this '80s version of the loyalty oath is less to deter drug use than to make people undergo a humiliating ritual of subordination: "When I say pee, you pee." The idea is to reinforce the principle that one must forfeit one's dignity and privacy to earn a living, and bring back the good old days when employers had the unquestioned right to demand that their workers' appearance and behavior, on or off the job, meet management's standards.
Ellen Willis
The tournament results show that in a Prisoner's Dilemma situation it is easy to be too clever. The very sophisticated rules did not do better than the simple ones. In fact, the so-called maximizing rules often did poorly because they got into a rut of mutual defection. A common problem with these rules is that they used complex methods of making inferences about the other player-and these inferences were wrong. Part of the problem was that a trial defection by the other player was often taken to imply that the other player could not be enticed into cooperation. But the heart of the problem was that these maximizing rules did not take into account that their own behavior would lead the other player to change.
Robert Axelrod
The possibility of such a transformation has been the central message of the great wisdom teachings of humankind. The messengers-Buddha, Jesus, and others, not all of them known-were humanity's early flowers. They were precursors, rare and precious beings. A widespread flowering was not yet possible at that time, and their message became largely misunderstood and often greatly distorted. It certainly did not transform human behavior, except in a small minority of people.
Eckhart Tolle
Behavior now must be changed from within the new consciousness rather than from Mosaic laws carving behavior from without. Sin and desire are now within conscious desire and conscious contrition, rather than in the external behaviors of the decalogue and the penances of temple sacrifice and community punishment. The divine kingdom to be regained is psychological not physical. It is metaphorical not literal. It is "within" not in extenso.
Julian Jaynes
Of course, when Hindus fought Hindus they observed these restraints because they shared the same values: both sides revered the same temples, monasteries, and, for that matter, cows. But Sita Ram Goel is right that the actions of the Muslims were in accord with Islamic law and precedent; these actions can't be attributed solely to attempts to end resistance and demoralize the locals. The Muslim invaders' behavior was consistent with the example of the Prophet who once enjoined one of his followers "to attack Ubna in the morning and burn the place."
Robert Spencer
One of the mistakes that Rand makes is that after she condemns a belief or an action, she goes on to tell you the psychology of the person who did it, as if she knows. I focus my judgment on the action and not on the person. My primary interest is: do I admire or dislike this behavior? And there, judgment is important for me. People often attribute all kinds of things to another person, without ever knowing where that person's coming from. Most of the time, I regard the judgment of people as a waste of time. I regard the judgment of behavior as imperative.
Nathaniel Branden
Men show at least as much zeal in mischief as in well doing, in folly as in wisdom. The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. Men must be bribed to build up and do good by the offer of an opportunity to hurt and pull down. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' - this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
Aldous Huxley
Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.
This personal morality may appear to be immorality itself in the eyes of those who lie to themselves, or who live a life of confusion, in such a manner that, for them, a lie becomes the truth, and our truth becomes a lie...
Jean Cocteau
The finding that there is a substantial genetic component to our behavior should not surprise us; indeed, it would be far more surprising if this were not the case. We are products of evolution: among our ancestors, natural selection indubitably exerted a strong influence over all traits that have figured in our survival.
James D. Watson
Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.
Ivan Illich
