Quotes About Culture

The IYI subscribes to The New Yorker, a journal designed so philistines can learn to fake a conversation about evolution, neurosomething, cognitive biases, and quantum mechanics.

This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare.

Technothinkers tend to have an "engineering mind"—to put it less politely, they have autistic tendencies. While they don't usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook characteristics of nerdiness—mostly lack of charm, interest in objects instead of persons, causing them to neglect their looks. They love precision at the expense of applicability. And they typically share an absence of literary culture.

Self-contradiction is made culturally to be shameful, a matter that can prove disastrous in science.

Have you noticed that while corporations sell you junk drinks, artisans sell you cheese and wine?

The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention.

The number of cultured people dropped below some critical level. Suddenly the place became a vacuum. Brain drain is hard to reverse, and some of the old refinement may be lost forever.

In fact, the reason I felt immediately at home in America is precisely because American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment. America's specialty is to take these small risks for the rest of the world, which explains this country's disproportionate share in innovations. Once established, an idea or a product is later "perfected" over there. Volatility

had no name for the color blue but managed rather well without it—we stayed for a long part of our history culturally, not biologically, color blind.

What Erasmus called ingratitudo vulgi, the ingratitude of the masses, is increasing in the age of globalization and the Internet.

And many of the problems of society come from the argument "other people are doing it.

Genes follow majority rule; languages minority rule. Languages travel; genes less so.

regretted not having insisted on speaking in Arabic

Indeed, people tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of "national identity," which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors, was shown to be a total fiction. ("National traits" might be great for movies, they might help a lot with war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity—yet, for example, both the English and the non-English erroneously believe in an English "national temperament.")

It was taken for granted that people learned to be tolerant there;

never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact—and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings.

I spent the past two decades wondering why France, as a country managed in a top-down manner by an oversized state, could fare so well in so many fields. It is the country of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, after all, the grand dreamer of a state that infiltrates everything. Indeed the current culture is ultra-interventionist, sort of "if it ain't broke, fix it.

so the gains in life expectancy are more societal than from the result of scientific advance.

The most privileged were sent to school in France, as both my grandfathers were

Le processus de la découverte (ou de l'innovation, ou du progrès technologique) dépend lui-même d'un bricolage antifragile, d'une brusque prise de risques plutôt que d'une culture formelle.

the more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake of thinking that skills in, say, skiing translate unfailingly into skills in managing a pottery workshop or a bank department, or that a good chess player would be a good strategist in real life)

Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules. Add to these tasks the "duty" of attending opera performances. The

American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment.

More than a third of the residents in London are foreign-born, and, in addition to immigrants