[BIG CAVEAT: The fact that a particular person is quoted below does not imply that I agree with all their views. I do not necessarily endorse their general philosophies, and indeed, in some cases I have strong disagreements with their foundational claims.]
Anonymous:
The bee does not waste his time trying to convince the fly that honey is preferable to feces.
~
David Z. Albert:
There is a deep and perennial and profoundly human impulse to approach the world with a demand, to approach the world with a precondition, that what has got to turn out to lie at the center of the universe, that what has got to turn out to lie at the foundation of all being, is some powerful and reassuring and accessible image of ourselves … and that, more than any of their particular factual inaccuracies — is what bothers me the most about them. It is precisely the business of resisting that demand, it is precisely the business of approaching the world with open and authentic wonder, and with a sharp, cold eye, and singularly intent upon the truth, that’s called science.
~
Aristotle:
The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.
~
Isaac Asimov:
Education isn’t something you can finish.
~
David Deutsch:
Evidence is rarely decisive, and only ever when good arguments have already explained why it should be.
* * *
… the conjunction (T₁ & T₂) of two mutually inconsistent explanatory theories T₁ and T₂ (such as quantum theory and relativity) is provably false, and therefore has zero probability. Yet it embodies some understanding of the world and is definitely better than nothing.
Furthermore if we expect, with Popper, that all our best theories of fundamental physics are going to be superseded eventually, and we therefore believe their negations, it is still those false theories, not their true negations, that constitute all our deepest knowledge of physics.
What science really seeks to ‘maximise’ (or rather, create) is explanatory power.
The Fabric of Reality
Being able to predict things or to describe them, however accurately, is not at all the same thing as understanding them.
* * *
Facts cannot be understood just by being summarized in a formula, any more than by being listed on paper or committed to memory. They can be understood only by being explained.
The Beginning of Infinity
It was mistakenly believed that we derived theories from the evidence of our senses: philosophical empiricism. But theories actually begin with bold conjectures, and empirical study is used to determine which theories are wrong.
* * *
Any assumption that the world is inexplicable can lead only to extremely bad explanations. For an inexplicable world is indistinguishable from … practically any myth or fantasy one likes.
* * *
Every putative physical transformation … is either: impossible because it is forbidden by the laws of nature; or achievable, given the right knowledge. … [This is a] fundamental connection between explanatory knowledge and technology ….
* * *
The deeper an explanation is, the more new problems it creates. That must be so, if only because there can be no such thing as an ultimate explanation: just as ‘the gods did it’ is always a bad explanation, so any other purported foundation of all explanations must be bad too. It must be easily variable because it cannot answer the question: why that foundation and not another? Nothing can be explained only in terms of itself.
* * *
The behavior of high-level physical quantities consists of nothing but the behavior of their low-level constituents with most of the details ignored. This has given rise to a widespread misconception about emergence and explanation, known as reductionism: the doctrine that science always explains and predicts things reductively, i.e., by analyzing them into components. Often it does …. But reductionism requires the relationship between different levels of explanation always to be like that, and often it is not.
* * *
Holists also often share with reductionists the mistaken belief that science can only (or should only) be reductive, and therefore they oppose much of science. All those doctrines are irrational for the same reason: they advocate accepting or rejecting theories on grounds other than whether they are good explanations.
* * *
Without error-correction, all information processing, and hence all knowledge-creation, is necessarily bounded.
* * *
[There] is the idea that it is possible to split a scientific theory into its predictive rules of thumb on the one hand and its assertions about reality (sometimes known as its ‘interpretation’) on the other. This does not make sense, because … without an explanation it is impossible to recognize the circumstances under which a rule of thumb is supposed to apply.
* * *
… the methodology of excluding explanation from a science is just a way of holding one’s explanations immune from criticism.
* * *
… in genuine science, one can claim to have measured a quantity only when one has an explanatory theory of how and why the measurement procedure should reveal its value, and with what accuracy.
* * *
‘Explanationless science’ is not really explanationless: rather, it has unstated and uncriticized assumptions.
* * *
The substance of scientific theories is explanation, and explanation of errors constitutes most of the content of the design of any non-trivial scientific experiment.
* * *
… as soon as scientists allow themselves to stop demanding good explanations and consider only whether a prediction is accurate or inaccurate, they are liable to make fools of themselves. This is the means by which a succession of eminent physicists over the decades have been fooled by conjurers ….
* * *
Like scientists, artists fail, revise, and try again to meet some standard.
~
Albert Einstein
Letter to Thorton, 1944
So many people today — and even professional scientists — seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is — in my opinion — the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.
~
Epictetus:
Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. Which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions; take a moment before reacting, and you will find it is easier to maintain control.
* * *
Let silence be your goal for the most part; say only what is necessary, and be brief about it. On the rare occasions when you’re called upon to speak, then speak, but never about banalities like gladiators, horses, sports, food and drink—common-place stuff. Above all, don’t gossip about people, praising, blaming, or comparing them.
~
Richard Feynman:
I’m smart enough to know that I’m dumb.
* * *
Science is a culture of doubt. Religion is a culture of faith.
* * *
Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter.
* * *
I have no responsibility to live up to what others expect of me. That’s their mistake, not my failing.
* * *
To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature. If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.
* * *
Progress in science comes when experiments contradict theory.
* * *
Being wrong isn’t a bad thing like they teach you in school. It is an opportunity to learn something.
* * *
The stupider you are, the smarter you think you are, and vice versa.
~
Galileo Galilei:
In the sciences, the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.
~
Ricky Gervais:
You could easily spot any Religion of Peace. Its extremist members would be extremely peaceful.
~
Werner Heisenberg:
Physics and Philosophy
One may say that the human ability to understand may be in a certain sense unlimited. But the existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.
* * *
When a chain of conclusions follows from given premises, the number of possible links in the chain depends on the precision of the premises. Therefore, the concepts of the general laws must in natural science be defined with complete precision, and this can be achieved only by means of mathematical abstraction.
~
Christopher Hitchens:
Forward to God: The Failed Hypothesis
How shall we live the good life and how shall we know its virtue? In the past millennia of primeval ignorance, pattern-seeking primates proposed a totalitarian solution to this question and threw all the responsibility onto a supreme dictator who demanded to be loved and feared at the same time. The story of human emancipation is the narrative of our liberation from this evil myth, and the greedy, ambitious primates who sought (as they still seek) to rule in its name.
~
Friedrich Nietzsche:
Beyond Good and Evil
But the struggle against Plato, or—to speak plainer, and for the ‘people’—the struggle against the ecclesiastical oppression of millennia of Christianity (for Christianity is Platonism for the people), produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul, such as had not existed anywhere previously; with such a tensely strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals.
* * *
… the greater part of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly influenced by his instincts, and forced into definite channels. And behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, there are valuations, or to speak more plainly, physiological demands, for the maintenance of a definite mode of life.
* * *
… without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, Man could not live ….
* * *
Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves indifference as a power—how could you live in accordance with such indifference?
* * *
People had been dreaming, and first and foremost—old Kant. ‘By means of a means (faculty)’—he had said, or at least meant to say. But, is that—an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question?
* * *
There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are “immediate certainties”; for instance, ‘I think,’ or as the superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, “I will”; as though cognition here got hold of its object purely and simply as ‘the thing in itself,’ without any falsification taking place either on the part of the subject or the object. I would repeat it, however, a hundred times, that ‘immediate certainty,’ as well as ‘absolute knowledge’ and the ‘thing in itself,’ involve a CONTRADICTIO IN ADJECTO; we really ought to free ourselves from the misleading significance of words!
* * *
… the philosopher must say to himself: “When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, ‘I think,’ I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘ego,’ and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking—that I know what thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps ‘willing’ or ‘feeling’?”
* * *
In place of the ‘immediate certainty’ … : “‘Whence did I get the notion of ‘thinking’? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an ‘ego,’ and even of an ‘ego’ as cause, and finally of an ‘ego’ as cause of thought?”
* * *
I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds—namely, that a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish; so that it is a perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think.’ One thinks; but that this ‘one’ is precisely the famous old ‘ego,’ is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an ‘immediate certainty.’ After all, one has even gone too far with this ‘one thinks’—even the ‘one’ contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself.
* * *
It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the ‘free will’ owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.
* * *
… the will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an emotion, and in fact the emotion of the command. That which is termed ‘freedom of the will’ is essentially the emotion of supremacy in respect to him who must obey ….
* * *
Inasmuch as in the given circumstances we are at the same time the commanding AND the obeying parties, and as the obeying party we know the sensations of constraint, impulsion, pressure, resistance, and motion, which usually commence immediately after the act of will; inasmuch as, on the other hand, we are accustomed to disregard this duality, and to deceive ourselves about it by means of the synthetic term “I”: a whole series of erroneous conclusions, and consequently of false judgments about the will itself, has become attached to the act of willing—to such a degree that he who wills believes firmly that willing suffices for action.
* * *
… he who wills believes with a fair amount of certainty that will and action are somehow one; he ascribes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensation of power which accompanies all success. ‘Freedom of Will’–that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order–who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his own will that overcame them. In this way the person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful ‘underwills’ or under-souls–indeed, our body is but a social structure composed of many souls–to his feelings of delight as commander.
* * *
The CAUSA SUI [the concept of a thing causing itself] is the best self-contradiction that has yet been conceived, it is a sort of logical violation and unnaturalness; but the extravagant pride of Man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with this very folly. The desire for ‘freedom of will’ in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be precisely this CAUSA SUI, and, with more than Munchausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness.
* * *
… one should use ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ only as pure conceptions, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and mutual understanding–not for explanation.
* * *
It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, reciprocity, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we interpret and intermix this symbol-world, as ‘being-in-itself,’ with things, we act once more as we have always acted–mythologically.
~
Massimo Pigliucci:
Without reason there simply would be no “ethics”–only rough pro-social instincts that would backfire in a post-Pleistocene environment.
~
Aron Ra:
The truth is what the facts are.
* * *
If you can’t show it, you don’t know it.
* * *
It doesn’t matter how pleasant it is: the only value any information can have is however accurate you can show it to be; and if you can’t show it is accurate at all, it has no value at all ….
* * *
Whether or not [anyone] believes … is not the criteria of anything that is really real. This is required [by] liars who want you to believe that it’s real because they want to believe it themselves, and they can’t maintain their own delusion if they allow you to question it, or because they can’t exert force if they can’t evoke fear.
* * *
Science doesn’t know everything. Religion doesn’t know anything.
~
Ayn Rand:
For the New Intellectual
In literature, we are shown a line-up of murderers, dipsomaniacs, drug addicts, neurotics and psychotics as representatives of Man’s soul—and are invited to identify our own among them—with the belligerent assertions that life is a sewer, a foxhole or a rat race, with the whining injunctions that we must love everything, except virtue, and forgive everything, except greatness.
* * *
A country without intellectuals is like a body without a head.
* * *
The majority of those who posture as intellectuals today are frightened zombies, posturing in a vacuum of their own making, who admit their abdication from the realm of the intellect by embracing such doctrines as Existentialism and Zen Buddhism.
* * *
There are no professional intellectuals in primitive … societies, there are only witch doctors. There were no professional intellectuals in the Middle Ages, there were only monks in monasteries. In the post-Renaissance era, prior to the birth of capitalism, the Men of the intellect—the philosophers, the teachers, the writers, the early scientists—were Men without a profession, that is: without a socially recognized position, without a market, without a means of earning a livelihood. Intellectual pursuits had to depend on the accident of inherited wealth or on the favor and financial support of some wealthy protector. And wealth was not earned on an open market, either; wealth was acquired by conquest, by force, by political power, or by the favor of those who held political power.
* * *
With very rare and brief exceptions, pre-capitalist societies … were ruled by faith and its practical expression: force. There were no makers of knowledge and no makers of wealth; there were only witch doctors and tribal chiefs. These two figures dominate every anti-rational period of history ….
* * *
These two figures—the man of faith and the man of force—are philosophical archetypes, psychological symbols and historical reality. As philosophical archetypes, they embody two variants of a certain view of Man and of existence. As psychological symbols, they represent the basic motivation of a great many Men who exist in any era, culture or society. As historical reality, they are the actual rulers of most of Mankind’s societies, who rise to power whenever Men abandon reason.
* * *
The essential characteristics of these two remain the same in all ages: Attila, the man who rules by brute force, acts on the range of the moment, is concerned with nothing but the physical reality immediately before him, respects nothing but man’s muscles, and regards a fist, a club or a gun as the only answer to any problem—and the Witch Doctor, the man who dreads physical reality, dreads the necessity of practical action, and escapes into his emotions, into visions of some mystic realm where his wishes enjoy a supernatural power unlimited by the absolute of nature. Superficially, these two may appear to be opposites, but observe what they have in common: a consciousness held down to the perceptual method of functioning ….
* * *
Attila feels no need to understand, to explain, nor even to wonder, how Men manage to produce the things he covets—“somehow” is a fully satisfactory answer inside his skull, which refuses to consider such questions as “how?” and “why?” or such concepts as identity and causality.
* * *
A human being needs a frame of reference, a comprehensive view of existence, no matter how rudimentary … a sense of being right, a moral justification of his actions, which means: a philosophical code of values. Who, then, provides Attila with values? The Witch Doctor. … While Attila extorts their obedience by means of a club, the Witch Doctor obtains it by means of a much more powerful weapon: he pre-empts the field of morality.
* * *
There is no way to turn morality into a weapon of enslavement except by divorcing it from Man’s reason and from the goals of his own existence. There is no way to degrade Man’s life on Earth except by the lethal opposition of the moral and the practical.
* * *
Morality is a code of values to guide Man’s choices and actions; when it is set to oppose his own life and mind, it makes him turn against himself and blindly act as the tool of his own destruction.
* * *
The damnation of this Earth as a realm where nothing is possible to Man but pain, disaster and defeat, a realm inferior to another, “higher,” reality; the damnation of all values, enjoyment, achievement and success on Earth as a proof of depravity; the damnation of Man’s mind as a source of pride, and the damnation of reason as a “limited,” deceptive, unreliable, impotent faculty, incapable of perceiving the “real” reality and the “true” truth; the split of Man in two, setting his consciousness (his soul) against his body, and his moral values against his own interest; the damnation of Man’s nature, body and self as evil; the commandment of self-sacrifice, renunciation, suffering, obedience, humility and faith, as the good; the damnation of life and the worship of death, with the promise of rewards beyond the grave—these are the necessary tenets of the Witch Doctor’s view of existence, as they have been in every variant of Witch Doctor philosophy throughout the course of Mankind’s history.
* * *
Attila’s fear of reality is as great as the Witch Doctor’s. Both hold their consciousness on a subhuman level and method of functioning: Attila’s brain is a jumble of concretes unintegrated by abstractions; the Witch Doctor’s brain is a miasma of floating abstractions unrelated to concretes. Both are guided and motivated—ultimately—not by thoughts, but by feelings and whims. Both cling to their whims as to their only certainty.
…
Attila feels that the Witch Doctor can give him what he lacks: a long-range view, an insurance against the dark unknown of tomorrow or next week or next year, a code of moral values to sanction his actions and to disarm his victims. The Witch Doctor feels that Attila can give him the material means of survival, can protect him from physical reality, can spare him the necessity of practical action, and can enforce his mystic edicts on any recalcitrant who may choose to challenge his authority.
* * *
… it is not the case that Attila and the Witch Doctor cannot or do not think; they can and do—but thinking, to them, is not a means of perceiving reality, it is a means of justifying their escape from the necessity of rational perception. Reason, to them, is a means of defeating their victims, a menial servant charged with the task of rationalizing the metaphysical validity and power of their whims.
* * *
Attila rules the realm of Men’s physical existence—the Witch Doctor rules the realm of Men’s consciousness. Attila herds Men into armies—the Witch Doctor sets the armies’ goals. Attila conquers empires—the Witch Doctor writes their laws. Attila loots and plunders—the Witch Doctor exhorts the victims to surpass their selfish concern with material property. Attila slaughters—the Witch Doctor proclaims to the survivors that scourges are a retribution for their sins. Attila rules by means of fear, by keeping men under a constant threat of destruction—the Witch Doctor rules by means of guilt, by keeping Men convinced of their innate depravity, impotence, and insignificance. Attila turns Men’s life on Earth into a living hell—the Witch Doctor tells them that it could not be otherwise.
* * *
Against whom is this alliance formed? Against those Men whose existence and character both Attila and the Witch Doctor refuse to admit into their view of the universe: the Men who produce. In any age or society, there are Men who think and work, who discover how to deal with existence, how to produce the intellectual and the material values it requires. These are the Men whose effort is the only means of survival for the parasites of all varieties: the Attilas, the Witch Doctors and the human ballast. The ballast consists of those who go through life in a state of unfocused stupor, merely repeating the words and the motions they learned from others.
~
Eric Weinstein:
The Portal, Episode #15
When we present science in front of the public we do it in one of two ways. Either we talk in an incredibly hand-wavy way about very speculative ideas …, or we have a sort of a corpse of previous scientific thought that has been specifically arranged for public viewing.
Joe Rogan Experience #1453
The last time we gained some serious insight into the way nuclei worked, that with a little bit of geometry …, gave us the namesake of the bikini. That was a terrifying moment: everything changed ….
* * *
We have a situation where we don’t know when ordinary individual humans will gain limitless destructive power.
* * *
The Artificial Intelligence Podcast with Lex Fridman, #39
I know that our time here [as a species on Earth] in this very long experiment is finite because the toys that we have built are so impressive, and the wisdom [needed] to accompany them has not materialized.
* * *
These people [physicists] created our economy: they gave us the Rad Lab and radar; they gave us two atomic devices to end World War II; they created the semi-conductor and transistor to power our economy through Moore’s Law; as a positive externality of particle accelerators, they created the World Wide Web. And we have the insolence to say “Why should we fund you with our tax-payer dollars?” No. The question is: “Are you enjoying your physics dollars?” … If they simply charged for every time you used a transistor or a URL, or enjoy the peace that they have provided during this time through the terrible weapons they have developed, or our communications devices ….
~
Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Rationality: A to Z (https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality)
So is rationality orthogonal to feeling? No; our emotions arise from our models of reality.
* * *
The whole idea of Science is, simply, reflective reasoning about a more reliable process for making the contents of your mind mirror the contents of the world. It is the sort of thing mice would never invent. Pondering this business of “performing replicable experiments to falsify theories”, we can see why it works. Science is not a separate magisterium, far away from real life and the understanding of ordinary mortals. Science is not something that only applies to the inside of laboratories. Science, itself, is an understandable process-in-the-world that correlates brains with reality.
* * *
There is a floor beneath your feet, but you don’t experience the floor directly; you see the light reflected from the floor, or rather, you see what your retina and visual cortex have processed of that light. To infer the floor from seeing the floor is to step back into the unseen causes of experience. It may seem like a very short and direct step, but it is still a step.
* * *
… don’t ask what to believe—ask what to anticipate. Every question of belief should flow from a question of anticipation, and that question of anticipation should be the center of the inquiry. Every guess of belief should begin by flowing to a specific guess of anticipation, and should continue to pay rent in future anticipations.
* * *
Back in the old days, there was no concept of religion being a separate magisterium. The Old Testament is a stream-of-consciousness culture dump: history, law, moral parables, and yes, models of how the universe works.
* * *
The modern concept of religion as purely ethical derives from every other area having been taken over by better institutions. Ethics is what’s left. Or rather, people think ethics is what’s left. … Ethics has not been immune to human progress …. Why do people think that ethics is still fair game?
* * *
The idea that religion is a separate magisterium which cannot be proven or disproven is a Big Lie — a lie which is repeated over and over again, so that people will say it without thinking; yet which is, on critical examination, simply false. It is a wild distortion of how religion happened historically, of how all scriptures present their beliefs, of what children are told to persuade them, and of what the majority of religious people on Earth still believe.
* * *
A hypothesis that forbids nothing, permits everything, and thereby fails to constrain anticipation. Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.
* * *
I encounter people who very definitely believe in evolution, who sneer at the folly of creationists. And yet they have no idea of what the theory of evolutionary biology permits and prohibits.
* * *
But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon can seem mysterious to some particular person. There are no phenomena which are mysterious of themselves. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance.
* * *
You have heard the unenlightened ones say, “Rationality works fine for dealing with rational people, but the world isn’t rational.” But faced with an irrational opponent, throwing away your own reason is not going to help you. There are lawful forms of thought that still generate the best response, even when faced with an opponent who breaks those laws. Decision theory does not burst into flames and die when faced with an opponent who disobeys decision theory.
* * *
Look at yourself in the mirror. Do you know what you’re looking at? Do you know what looks out from behind your eyes? Do you know what you are? Some of that answer, Science knows, and some of it Science does not. But why should that distinction matter to your curiosity, if you don’t know? Do you know how your knees work? Do you know how your shoes were made? Do you know why your computer monitor glows? Do you know why water is wet? The world around you is full of puzzles. Prioritize, if you must. But do not complain that cruel Science has emptied the world of mystery. With reasoning such as that, I could get you to overlook an elephant in your living room.
* * *
The one who buys a lottery ticket, saying, “But you can’t know that I’ll lose.” The one who disbelieves in evolution, saying, “But you can’t prove to me that it’s true.” The one who refuses to confront a difficult-looking problem, saying, “It’s probably too hard to solve.” The problem is motivated skepticism, a.k.a. disconfirmation bias—more heavily scrutinizing assertions that we don’t want to believe. Humility, in its most commonly misunderstood form, is a fully general excuse not to believe something; since, after all, you can’t be sure. Beware of fully general excuses!
* * *
False dilemmas are often presented to justify unethical policies that are, by some vast coincidence, very convenient.
* * *
It’s a most peculiar psychology—this business of “Science is based on faith too, so there!” Typically this is said by people who claim that faith is a good thing. Then why do they say “Science is based on faith too!” in that angry-triumphal tone, rather than as a compliment? And a rather dangerous compliment to give, one would think, from their perspective. If science is based on ‘faith’, then science is of the same kind as religion—directly comparable. If science is a religion, it is the religion that heals the sick and reveals the secrets of the stars.
* * *
… it seems to me that to prevent public misunderstanding, maybe scientists should go around saying “We are not INFINITELY certain” rather than “We are not certain”. For the latter case, in ordinary discourse, suggests you know some specific reason for doubt.
* * *
What business is it of mine, if someone else chooses to believe what is pleasant rather than what is true? Can’t we each choose for ourselves whether to care about the truth? An obvious snappy comeback is: “Why do you care whether I care whether someone else cares about the truth?” It is somewhat inconsistent for your utility function to contain a negative term for anyone else’s utility function having a term for someone else’s utility function.
* * *
The counterintuitive idea underlying science is that factual disagreements should be fought out with experiments and mathematics, not violence and edicts. This incredible notion can be extended beyond science, to a fair fight for the whole Future. You should have to win by convincing people, and should not be allowed to burn them.
* * *
If the Enemy has an average disposition, and is acting from beliefs about their situation that would make violence a typically human response, then that doesn’t mean their beliefs are factually accurate. It doesn’t mean they’re justified. It means you’ll have to shoot down someone who is the hero of their own story, and in their novel the protagonist will die on page 80. That is a tragedy, but it is better than the alternative tragedy. It is the choice that every police officer makes, every day, to keep our neat little worlds from dissolving into chaos.
* * *
Orwell knew that muddled language is muddled thinking; he knew that human evil and muddled thinking intertwine …. For perpetrators of evil to avoid its natural opposition, … Clarity must be avoided at any cost. Even as humans of clear sight tend to oppose the evil that they see; so too does human evil, wherever it exists, set out to muddle thinking.
* * *
Resisting any temptation takes conscious expenditure of an exhaustible supply of mental energy. It is not in fact true that we can “just say no”–not just say no, without cost to ourselves.
火看 Gazing by Lamplight 
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