Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields - and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible.
Here's what I didn't know when I was starting out that I now know…I thought when you were starting out it was really hard to write because you hadn't broken in yet, you hadn't really hit your stride yet. What I found out paradoxically is that the next script you write doesn't get easier because you wrote one before…each one gets harder by a factor of 10.
As time passes and the more advanced science becomes, the more interesting it becomes.
The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.
At some point, I thought that, as I got older, I'd come to terms with a lot of things. I'd solve some big problems, and eventually I'd become content. It's almost more depressing to think that the older you get, the more your problems multiply.
In a single sentence the moral is: admit that complexity always increases, first from the model you fit to the data, thence to the model you use to think about and plan about the experiment and its analysis, and thence to the true situation.
Mankind is getting smarter every day. Actually, it only seems so. At least we are making progress. We're progressing, to be sure, ever more deeply into the forest.
Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I'm noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating.
It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow.
I find the world more absurd now than I did when I was a kid.
Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.
The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe.
My task is becoming more and more delicate, while the difficulties increase constantly.
Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.
However, a good life consists of more than simply the totality of enjoyable experiences. It must also have a meaningful pattern, a trajectory of growth that results in the development of increasing emotional, cognitive, and social complexity.
