Entries by tag: knowledge
and not to answer them:
This skill is most needful in times of
stress and darkness.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Left Hand of Darkness.”
--H.L. Mencken
One fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
--Robert Kennedy
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant threat winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
--Isaac Asimov
Democracy if four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
--Ambrose Bierce
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
--Winston S. Churchill
The main problem in any democracy is that the crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage and whip their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy -- then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards than the tube for a nickel apiece.
--Hunter S. Thompson
Quotes from page 18 of the Funny Times, September 2017
a. The willingness to admit ignorance. Modern science is based on the Latin injunctioin ignoramus - 'we do not know'. It assumes that we don't know everything. Even more critically, it accepts that the things we think we know could be proven wrong as we gain more knowledge. No concept, idea or theory is sacred and beyond challenge.
b. The centrality of observation and mathematics. Having admitted ignorance, modern science aims to obtain new knowledge. It does so by gathering observations and then using mathematical tools to connect these observations into comprehensive theories.
c. The acquisition of new powers. Modern science is not content with creating theories. It uses these theories in order to acquire new powers, and in particular to develop new technologies.
The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.
(He goes on to discuss how the premodern religious traditions of the world all assert that we already knew everything that we needed to know, and tamped down inquiries.)
-p250-251 in Sapiens
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
—Isaac Asimov
THE MISTRUST OF SCIENCE
By Atul Gawande , JUNE 10, 2016
The following was delivered as the commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, on Friday, June 10th.
Atul Gawande, a surgeon and public-health researcher, became a New Yorker staff writer in 1998.
a mysterious gift bestowed at birth.
It is the product of particular ways of thinking,
of gathering information,
of updating beliefs.
These habits of thought can be learned and cultivated
by any intelligent, thoughtful,
determined person.
--Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner on page 18 in
Superforecasting; the Art and Science of Prediction
If you cannot
explain it
in simple terms,
you do not
understand it fully.
~Albert Einstein
Does it mean, if you don’t understand something, and the community of physicists don’t understand it, that means God did it?... If that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.
--Neil DeGrasse Tyson
( Great article here from the NY TimesCollapse )
When Shiva the Great Yogin chooses
to become the Lord of the Dance, Nataraja,
the universe appears as Consciousness
in its most ecstatic forms:
as art and play, as knowledge and beauty,
as the very embodiment of awareness
in the form of the Self.
—From Clothed in Consciousness:
Nataraja in the Tantric Tradition
by Dr. Douglas Brooks
Comments