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> It is likely that the chief competitive advantage of human beings is not our individual skill for rational thought, but our collective capacity for transmitti
by wolverine876 4y ago
> It is likely that the chief competitive advantage of human beings is not our individual skill for rational thought, but our collective capacity for transmitting and evolving cultural knowledge over centuries and millennia.
What is that based on? Plenty of cultural knowledge (what is that?) has been plainly wrong and destructive. Humanity has advanced when we've focused on rational thought, especially since the Enlightenment. Astrology and hate are cultural knowledge; astronomy and universal human rights are rational thought.
> We tend to see rational and cultural forms of knowledge as being in conflict with each other, but I have come to understand that as an oversimplified and often misleading point of view.
You said it and then called it oversimplfied. I agree that it's oversimplified.
- inimino 4y agoUniversal human rights are not rational thought, they are values. You don't think your way into your values.
- wolverine876 4y agoI agree they are values, but they are also the product of lots of rational thought. Look at all the Enlightenment thinkers who produced it. I know people get carried away with Internet memes, but now we are rejecting rational thought? What will your basis for decisions be? Just follow the herd?
- inimino 4y agoNobody is rejecting rational thought. Most of your values are innate and most of the rest is socialization. This is not an "internet meme", it's the consensus view since approximately the time of Plato.
- jltsiren 4y agoRational thought is like mathematics: it makes no difference between the real world and hypothetical worlds. If you feed garbage in, you get garbage out. Like communism, Holodomor, and the Great Leap Forward. Those are good examples of what the humanity has achieved with rational thought. If anything, modern science is less about rationalism and more about empiricism than what came before. It's less about thinking and more about doing; less about explaining and more about ruling out explanations.
- wolverine876 4y ago> Like communism, Holodomor, and the Great Leap Forward. Those are good examples of what the humanity has achieved with rational thought. I could list a bunch of crappy software and say that's what humanity achieves with computers. It's laughable to say that the list above represents our achievements with rational thought. How do you make decisions without rational thought? What do you use instead?