Quotes from Heather E. Heying

modernity is doing something to us at a deeply fundamental level, and the fact that we don't understand it is alarming.

When walking into a system that is new to us, it can be more effective to be naïve to what others have thought, at least at first. If you are already certain of what the solution set of probabilities looks like, you lose some of what it is to be human... You lose access to truth, because the only way you will see what is true is if it is already a match for what you thought beforehand. This is a path that therefore cannot grow your understanding.

It is the pinnacle of arrogance to assume that whatever it is that "the experts" believe now is in fact the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Scientists have believed and public health officials have promoted many wrong things over the years, for both honorable, and not so honorable reasons. Sometimes the public health message is dead wrong.

Even though it is logically obvious that we must accept equilibrium, we are not built to be satisfied with it because being unsatisfied has been an excellent strategy for the last several billion years.

We have arrived in the 21st century with evolutionary baggage, and a fair bit of intellectual confusion. Let us inderstand the baggage, in order to reduce the confusion, and increase our odds of moving forward with maximal human flourishing.

If culture was not paying its way, the genes whose expression it is modifying would either go extinct or evolve to be as immune to culture as an oak tree.