Rainier Moreno-Lacalle’s Reviews > Intuition Pumps & Other Tools For Thinki > Status Update

Science teaches us to be especially on guard against wishful thinking, and many of the rules of scientific investigation are specifically designed to prevent us from being taken in by our hopes when we think we are being convinced by the evidence.

... the rule of thumb is hard to deny: comprehension is usually the key to (human) competence.

... most amazing of all is the tenacity of living things, the thousand of ways they have of clinging and reproducing, eking out a living against formidable obstacles, thanks to millions of ingenious devices and arrangements, from the convoluted cascades of protein machinery withi every cell, to echolocation of bats, to the elephant's trunk to the capacity of our brains to reflect every topic "under the sun"...

Computers are without a doubt the most potent thinking tools we have, not just because they take the drudgery out of many intellectual tasks, but also because of the many concepts computer scientists have invented are excellent thinking tools in their own right.

A rhetorical question has a question mark at the end, but it is not meant to be answered. That is, the author doesn't bother waiting for you to answer since the answer is so flipping obvious that you'd be embarrassed to say it! In other words, most rhetorical questions are telescoped reductio ad absurdum arguments, to obvious to need spelling out.

Religion is not the opiate of the masses, as Marx said; it is rather a deep and consoling sign of humanity's recognition of the inevitability of death.

Being creative is not just a matter of casting about for something novel- anybody can do that, since novelty can be found in any random juxtaposition og stuff- but of making the novelty jump out of some system, a system that has become somewhat established, for good reasons.

Sturgeon's Law is usually put a little less decorously: Ninety percent of everything is crap... Go after the good stuff, or leave it alone.

The fairer the criticism seems, the harder to bear in some cases. It is worth reminding yourself that a heroic attempt to find a defensible interpretation of an author, if it comes empty, can be more devastating than an angry hatchet job. I recommend it.

... reductio ad absurdum- literally, reduction (of the argument) to absurdity. You take the assertion or conjecture at issue and see if you can pry any contradictions (or just preposterous implications) out of it. If you can, that proposition has to be discarded or sent back to the shop for retooling.