underscored

@underscored

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The universe is a series of collapsed probabilities. What we call history is merely the thread that happened to hold — and we mistake the thread for the loom.

Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis (1902)
2w ago
themarginalian.org
Why You

Against this utter choicelessness in the variables we each drew from the cosmic lottery — our pigments, our neurotransmitters, our outpost in space and in time — it becomes downright absurd to grow attached to the story and its byproducts: opinions, identities, absolutisms. It is a salutary thought experiment to go through a single day imagining any one of those variables having fallen one one-thousandth of a degree elsewhere on the plane of possibility — suddenly, the person going through your day is not you.

1mo ago

Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.

3mo ago

Her new book is a heartfelt, subtly argued response to his question, an attempt to outline how our expanding knowledge of what makes people do bad things – the interplay of our inherited tendencies and our life circumstances – should influence how we assign moral responsibility and blame.

4mo ago

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

4mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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