Closed and Open Minds
Infidel753, Closed and open minds, Infidel753 Blog
There is a certain type of person who never asks questions because he already knows all the answers. He is usually, though not always, to be found among the ranks of the ideological far right or left, or among the devoutly religious. He is good at preaching, but bad at listening. He never deigns to look at any website or other source which deviates from his own belief system, for he knows he has nothing to learn from such benighted fools (and, perhaps, fears a sort of mental contamination). He makes frequent use of epithets ending in -ist or -phobe. Curiously enough, he is usually far more passionate about what he is against than about what he is for.
He who has no doubts can never learn anything new, can never become more than what he already is. He who refuses to ever read or listen to opposing views is doomed to live in a bubble, seeing everything outside it murkily through his own reflection.
Rejection of rigid orthodoxy does not mean one must entertain every absurdity that comes along, or must refrain from ever coming to a definitive conclusion about some question. It does mean being open to at least the possibility that new evidence may someday show that one’s conclusions are mistaken. I myself have often been confronted with new and intriguing ideas which I ultimately rejected because a rational analysis of the available evidence did not support them. I have also sometimes abandoned ideas in which I had believed fervently for years, when the growing weight of new experience and knowledge led me to accept that they were not valid. This is usually an unpleasant process. It is also a vital prerequisite for the attainment of true knowledge and understanding.
Keep this in mind when evaluating any ideology or group. Are they willing to entertain a variety of viewpoints? Can they acknowledge that they might not know the answer to a question, or that it is possible for them to be wrong occasionally? Do they treat at least some of their adversaries with respect, however grudging? Do they put the greater part of their energy into supporting their own ideas rather than into attacking those they oppose? Do they make you feel that you would be free to speak out against them if they were in power? These questions hold much of the key to evaluating their merit.
“Well, when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?”
~Paul Samuelson, 1970 Nobel Laureat in Economics
Advice for culture warrior Ron DeSantis: A satire
Boston Globe – August 11
as to the post, i could have said the same things myself. But there is a danger of self delusion here.
We have been told by a very scientific person right here on AB that people who disagree with him deserve contempt if not forced vaccination and having their posts deleted. All for very pious reasons.
I could go on. I have gone on. It hasn’t done me any good. Because changing your mind is indeed very hard to do. Especially when you are Right. No, not that Right.
“But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.” – John Maynard Keynes
[“In the long run we are all dead” is often quoted out of context imbuing that single sentence with a meaning entirely different and in contradiction to that which Keynes intended. However, this alternate meaning to that Spartan aphorism does have a certain reassuring beauty all of its own.]
Ron
I don’t think I have heard the entirely diffrent meaning.
as a sophomore i was entirely charmed by the mathematics of economics. which was strange, because as a freshman i had enough sense to walk out of an economics class because their basic premises seemed completely wrong to me. i have since learned that beautiful mathematics is often achieved by leaving out relevant facts.
sophomore is generally understood to be a phase of life where you think you know everything because you know nothing but had wise teachers. see sophist:
nouna paid teacher of philosophy and rhetoric in ancient Greece, associated in popular thought with moral skepticism and specious reasoning. • a person who reasons with clever but fallacious arguments. yes, this is on topic: “we are smarter than you because WE can change our minds.”
Coberly,
Keynes was certainly smart enough to use beautiful mathematics, but he was wise enough to not use beautiful mathematics. Keynes had a gift for seeing the patently obvious and then not shrugging it off. A firm grasp of the obvious is better than not.
In any case, Keynes believed that steering the economy out of the storm’s way before the ship of state sank to the bottom was warranted while his peers were better at postmortems than preventive care. My twist on it is that with policy firmly in the grasp of morons, then survival will soon become a more grim choice than death. This assumes that in twenty years, then the living will look back on 2023 as when the weather was still relatively nice and comfortable. Then we might even think that anti-vaxxers are merely looking for the nearest exit.
Ron
“Over the years I have found that it is difficult if not impossible to bring to consciousness of another person the nature of his tacit assumptions when, by some special experiences, I have been made aware of them. This became painfully evident to me in my attempts during the 1950s to convince geneticists that the action of genes had to be and was controlled. It is now equally painful to recognize the fixity of assumptions that many persons hold on the nature of controlling elements in maize and the manners of their operation. One must await the right time for conceptual change.[62]””
this is from Barbara McClintock. whom I would not expect you to know about. I would expect our resident scientist to know about her. I think he would agree with her, even, not realizing she was talking about him, or “us”..all of “us.”
As for the anti-vaxxers, I think many of them may have had “special experiences” that make them skeptical, or just afraid. Probably most of them are just taking the word of politicians and pundits who tell them they are smarter than the elites who look down on them [our scientist being one of those].
I take the position that while I have no right to force them to be vaccinated, they have no right to get into my airspace if I am afraid I might catch something from them. This seems to me to open the way to livable compromise. Instead we get people throwing hate across the backyard fence at each other. And the Devil, as always, is on both sides.
Note, the Devil is a well known literary figure, but people who don’t read much wouldn’t know about that. [note for scientists: think of it as a figure of speech, kind of like an analogy you would use to try to explain a scientific idea to the layman.]
Tis feels like a kind of flattery instead of useful information. “If you have good enough taste to be reading this, congratulations, you are open-minded.”
Eric
yes, but you see it is scientific self-flattery. it has been warned against for several thousand years, but there is no scientific evidence for it, even though it has more to do with your life than anything in science except maybe the atomic bomb. though I have heard the use of the atomic bomb may not be a scientific subject…unless game theory is scientific. [for those who don’t know, or haven’t heard—i have no scientific proof that the story is true–game theorists in the 1940’s and 50’s were arguing that using our atomic bomb on the Russians before they got one of their own was the best strategy for winning the war against them, though there was no such war at the time.]
Though some will see this as off-topic…
there may have been a couple of people who seeing the danger to the world of America taking the “Bomb the Russians first” idea (theory? hypothesis?) seriously, helped the Russians to get their own bomb in time to spoil the premise of the theory.
Though they were executed as traitors, a time may come when their statue is on the Mall for saving the lives of millions of people, including us.
That is, if Putin does not show us the limits of Mutual Assured Detruction.
That sounds like something that would have been proposed initially by the John Birch Society, but that did not exist until 1958, long after the USSR had produced their atomic (and by then hydrogen) bombs. By then, too late.
Russia (and the USSR previously) produces absolutely fine physicists who were fully capable of coming up with nuclear weapons, and obviously felt that they had to, because the US had. A monopoly was not to be permitted.
It is known that Douglas MacArthur, master of post-war Japan and responsible initially for dealing with the Korean Conflict, was strongly advocating use of nuclear weapons on Chinese forces participating in that ‘police action’. It’s one of the reasons he was fired.
The Relief of Douglas MacArthur
Dobbs
i think you are essentially correct, but i doubt the John Birch Society ever heard of game theory. No, the proposal was from very eminent scientists.
Back in the day, MacArthur was a hero and Truman was not, so when T fired M there was plenty of outrage against T from my neighbors in Chicago who were, I should think, Democrats. I am not sure the issue was the use of the Bomb. I think that was considered by top generals and rejected on it’s merits (among which was, maybe, that by then the Russians had their own bomb, and we had learned that we had enough power to hold the Chinese/NorthKoreans to a draw. I have heard that Ike threatened using (did not rule out) using the bomb, and of course we have never “ruled it out,” MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) being our best defense. Unfortunately now we have Mad Putin who threatens to use it and glories in the fast trip to heaven our Massive Retaliation would provide to the Russian people.
meanwhile
we may have learned that inch at a time sitting on our hands can be as dangerous to the future of the human race as the Big Kablooie. and given human nature, more certain.