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Henry Farrell Quotes

born 1970 Ireland

Henry Farrell is an Irish-born political scientist and blogger who is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Farrell was one of the founders of the philosophy group blog Crooked Timber, is the author of academic and trade books including Underground Empire (2023, with Abe Newman), and is a frequent op-ed writer in The New York Times.

Ireland
Academics

Random Henry Farrell quote

5 quotes

Inside every hungry entrepreneur, there is a bloated monopolist struggling to get out.

Loose canons can give rise to loose cannons: the intellectual consequences of e.g. Atlas Shrugged, Zero to One, and The Sovereign Individual have mostly been pernicious.

There is a famous Mario Cuomo dictum that a politician should campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Donald Trump both campaigns and governs in the language of shitposts. His great tragedy is that this is all that he is capable of doing.

We can blame the English language for a lot of things. But it is never going to become conscious and decide to turn us into paperclips. LLMs don’t have personalities, but compressions of genre that can support a mixture of ‘choose your own adventure’ with role-playing game. It is very important not to confuse the latter for the former.

The authoritarian who wants to build a ruling coalition needs not only to make their success seem like a fait accompli. She also needs to persuade others that they will prosper rather than suffer from joining. The aspiring authoritarian needs to persuade allies that she (and they) will predate on outgroups, and that she will not predate on the allies themselves.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Henry Farrell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.