4 ms·

> Humans naturally seek reasons why they are right, but to understand the universe, you must seek reasons why you are wrong. Fantastic! Is that original?

kordless 11y ago
Buddhism's eightfold path puts you to finding internal dissonance and resolving it, so I'd say it's similar from a philosophical viewpoint. The quote jerf makes is quite succinct, however. A good one to remember and repeat often.
jerf 11y ago
It very obviously is the result of many other ideas, and I won't deny that. However, I have not seen this particular focus sharpened down to this brevity anywhere else. It came from a slightly different source for me, but a similar one. Imagine you're thrust back in time 200-400 years, and let's just stick you in England or something where you've got a University and a willing audience to learn. How do you transfer as much knowledge as possible, as quickly as possible? Well, as much as I think the Prime Directive of Star Trek is a bit of a crock as a moral principle [1], as a descriptive principle we can see there's some truth to it today, if we look around with open eyes... simply transferring knowledge without transferring the ability to develop it yourself, or, if you prefer, transferring wisdom, is a dangerous thing to do, and tends not to produce lasting results. So I asked myself what my thesis would be, what's something short and simple that I would repeatedly hammer on? And that's what I came up with. I would also do that thing that some of the best teachers do, where they tell you "I'm going to deliberately screw up derivations in class, it's on you to catch them", to try to avoid being treated as personally reliable myself. (The "Dark Ages" are widely misunderstood and were not the barren wasteland of knowledge advancement the popular conception has of it, but I do think you could make a good case that they were indeed slowed down by over-privileging Aristotle and the other such classical authors for too long.) [1]: Specifically, it leaves a rich space of options between "completely leaving the society in poverty to their own devices" and "just blunder in and start selling tech with wild abandon" completely unexplored. It's a great dramatic device, I really have no problem with it within the show itself, but it doesn't travel out of that context well.

kordless 11y ago

Buddhism's eightfold path puts you to finding internal dissonance and resolving it, so I'd say it's similar from a philosophical viewpoint. The quote jerf makes is quite succinct, however. A good one to remember and repeat often.

jerf 11y ago

It very obviously is the result of many other ideas, and I won't deny that. However, I have not seen this particular focus sharpened down to this brevity anywhere else. It came from a slightly different source for me, but a similar one. Imagine you're thrust back in time 200-400 years, and let's just stick you in England or something where you've got a University and a willing audience to learn. How do you transfer as much knowledge as possible, as quickly as possible? Well, as much as I think the Prime Directive of Star Trek is a bit of a crock as a moral principle [1], as a descriptive principle we can see there's some truth to it today, if we look around with open eyes... simply transferring knowledge without transferring the ability to develop it yourself, or, if you prefer, transferring wisdom, is a dangerous thing to do, and tends not to produce lasting results. So I asked myself what my thesis would be, what's something short and simple that I would repeatedly hammer on? And that's what I came up with. I would also do that thing that some of the best teachers do, where they tell you "I'm going to deliberately screw up derivations in class, it's on you to catch them", to try to avoid being treated as personally reliable myself. (The "Dark Ages" are widely misunderstood and were not the barren wasteland of knowledge advancement the popular conception has of it, but I do think you could make a good case that they were indeed slowed down by over-privileging Aristotle and the other such classical authors for too long.) [1]: Specifically, it leaves a rich space of options between "completely leaving the society in poverty to their own devices" and "just blunder in and start selling tech with wild abandon" completely unexplored. It's a great dramatic device, I really have no problem with it within the show itself, but it doesn't travel out of that context well.