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‘resonant’ molecule
what we are actually seeing is a single-universe perspective on a larger object that extends some way into other universes.
Let me define ‘bad philosophy’ as philosophy that is not merely false, but actively prevents the growth of other knowledge.
Bad philosophy
can be countered by progress.
Copenhagen interpretation Niels Bohr’s combination of instrumentalism, anthropocentrism and studied ambiguity, used to avoid understanding quantum theory as being about reality.
Positivism The bad philosophy that everything not ‘derived from observation’ should be eliminated from science.
Logical positivism The bad philosophy that statements not verifiable by obse...
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With the Enlightenment came much more good philosophy, but bad philosophy became much worse, with the descent from empiricism (merely false) to positivism, logical positivism, instrumentalism, Wittgenstein, linguistic philosophy, and the ‘postmodernist’ and related movements.
They have been not outweighed, but out-argued, refuted and abandoned.
all rational voters create their own explanation for which checkbox they personally should choose.
They are choosing which experiments are to be attempted next, and (principally) which are to be abandoned because there is no longer a good explanation for why they are best. The politicians, and their policies, are those experiments.
insignificant in comparison with the greater effectiveness of plurality voting at removing bad governments and policies.
human life can improve without limit as
we advance from misconception to ever better misconception.
Social-choice theory
the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options.
Good policies are hard to vary, and therefore conflicting policies are discrete and cannot be arbitrarily mixed.
Popper’s criterion of how easy they make it to remove bad rulers and bad policies. That designates the plurality voting system as best in the case of advanced political cultures.
Facts can be used to criticize aesthetic theories, as they can moral theories.
Why are flowers beautiful?
flowers have to create objective beauty, and insects have to recognize objective beauty.
Humans seem to have an inborn liking for symmetry.
There are only two basic strategies of meme replication: to help prospective holders or to disable the holders’ critical faculties.
Western civilization is in an unstable transitional period between stable, static societies consisting of anti-rational memes and a stable dynamic society consisting of rational memes.
Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man was one of the inspirations for this book.
Sustain The term has two almost opposite, but often confused, meanings: to provide someone with what they need, and to prevent things from changing.
Static societies eventually fail because their characteristic inability to create knowledge rapidly must eventually turn some problem into a catastrophe.
history is the history of ideas, not of the mechanical effects of biogeography.
we need rapid progress in science and technology and as much wealth as possible.
the nature of science would be better understood if we called theories ‘misconceptions’ from the outset, instead of only after we have discovered their successors.
If people thought of it like that, perhaps no one would need to be reminded that science claims neither infallibility nor finality.
a continual transition from problems to better problems,
mathematicians’ understanding of what is fundamental improves.
progress in mathematics also goes from problems to better problems,
Optimism and reason are incompatible with the conceit that our knowledge is ‘nearly there’ in any sense, or that its foundations are.
while differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.
