Quotes About Indirection

Most important, the intelligence that will emerge will continue to represent the human civilization, which is already a human-machine civilization. In other words, future machines will be human, even if they are not biological. This will be the next step in evolution, the next high-level paradigm shift, the next level of indirection.

Evolution works through indirection: each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.

It is often mild distraction that moves imagination forward, not uninterrupted concentration. Thinking then works by indirection, sauntering in a roundabout way to places it cannot reach directly.

He described his grand strategy as indirection. If General Motors hired Joe Schmo to sell cars, Joe Schmo would give an interview to Road & Track, telling them the specs of the Thunderbird, engine size in cubic inches, zero-to-sixty, and so on. Given the same job, Bernays would lobby Congress for higher speed limits, making it more fun to own a Thunderbird. Rather than fight for a single season of sales, he would make the world more friendly to his product.

Bernays set various goals: convince the American people of the Communist presence in Guatemala; convince members of Congress the issue is a winner; convince the CIA, which can actually do something on the ground, it's time to act. Bernays wouldn't make the world better for bananas, he would make the world better for American politicians, who would make the world better for the CIA, which would make the world better for bananas. Indirection.

So. Ixnay on the direct approach.

So much of my life has been about self-effacement, pretense, masquerading, concealment, and indirection.

When you do things in a soft way, you make the other people believe they've thought up something to do for you, when actually you're directing them." Later, Ruth

I believe in the oblique, the indirect approach and I keep my feelings to myself.

Design patterns should not be applied indiscriminately. Often they achieve flexibility and variability by introducing additional levels of indirection, and that can complicate a design and/or cost you some performance. A design pattern should only be applied when the flexibility it affords is actually needed.

Subtlety and indirection are important tools, but you can't scale the highest peaks with these tools alone.

The documentation of the Blitz is particularly valuable in that it shows that Christian nationalists have self-consciously embraced a strategy of advancing their goals through deception and indirection.

I tend to navigate by indirection, meaning that most of the major things in my life have happened when I've been thinking about something else.

Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.

Because of the sexual politics of previous eras, the comediennes to whom Roseanne [Barr] sees herself linked--Mae West, Judy Holliday, Lucille Ball--got their way by cunning indirection. But Roseanne prefers the head butt to the bon mot. She can rumble.

All problems in Computer Science can be solved by another level of indirection.

In nightmares, we can't look into our own eyes except by indirection, perhaps because we fear discovering that therein lie the worst monsters plaguing us.