Quotes from the book "System Error"

Quotes from the book "System Error".

There are decades when nothing happens—and weeks where decades happen.
System Error explores what breaks when fast-moving technology outpaces slow-moving institutions.
When metrics become goals, and optimization replaces wisdom, systems fail quietly at scale.
Progress needs better rules—not just better leaders.

“There are decades when nothing happens, and then there are weeks where decades happen.” History doesn’t move linearly—it accelerates suddenly, often without warning.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”Governance exists not because humans are perfect, but precisely because we are not.

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”The most meaningful outcomes often resist neat quantification.

The metric becomes the goal, and the means justify the end. This is Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. 

To optimize for science, some argue we need a beneficent technocrat in charge.

Democracy, they claim, is too slow—and holds scientific progress back. The race between innovation and democracy is real. Technologies move fast; institutions do not.

Asymptotically, any finite tax code collects zero revenue. Given enough incentive, clever people will always find ways around fixed rules.

Oscar Wilde observed: “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” Desire fulfilled can be as destabilizing as desire denied.

The bottom line: we need good rules, not merely good rulers. Systems matter more than intentions.

Social scientists call this the privacy paradox. There’s a vast gap between what people say about valuing privacy and how they actually behave.

Aristotle famously argued that “wealth is clearly not the good we are seeking, since it is merely useful for getting something else.” Money is a means—not an end.

By one estimate, workers earning less than $20 per hour face an 83% probability of displacement by automation, while those earning more than $40 per hour are almost immune.

Autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Asking an epidemiologist to assess an intervention’s impact on diseases of unknown origin—in migrant populations with no medical records, living amid high viral mutation—reveals the limits of even expert-driven decision-making.

A small number of extremely active users generated the overwhelming majority of hyperpartisan content on Twitter before the 2012 election. The strongest predictor of fake news sharing is age. Older users are significantly more likely to pass along false stories.

The global stage is now defined by three competing models: China’s digital authoritarianism, America’s digital innovation, and Europe’s regulatory governance.

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