"Why should we put a statistical, collective goal – i.e., more equal sex ratios in STEM – above the happiness and autonomy of the flesh-and-blood individuals who constitute those collectives? Why should policy makers’ preference for gender parity take precedence over individual men and women’s preferences regarding their own careers and lives?"
"It’s often a good idea to adopt the practices and beliefs of the people around you. For one thing, the people around you aren’t dead. If you do what they do – eat what they eat; avoid the dark alleys they avoid – you might continue not being dead as well."
"However, the absence of perfect concealment does not imply the presence of active advertisement, and if fertility were advertised in humans, we would presumably not need to employ sophisticated experimental methods to demonstrate its detectability."
"Some claim that life, the universe, and mind are miraculous. My conclusion is that these things are really, really amazing, but that they’re not miraculous (unless by miraculous, you just mean ‘really, really amazing’)."
"To a hypothetical alien with a vastly superior intellect to our own, human minds would be classed as intermediate forms between the mindless and the fully minded."
"When you contemplate the universe, part of the universe becomes conscious of itself."
"Some people worry that to say we are nothing but matter is to deny that we think or feel. It’s not. The strange fact is that, when suitably arranged, matter thinks and feels."