“Ask anyone, and they’ll say the same thing: they’re pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong.”
I generally find myself arguing against open-mindedness; because “open-mindedness” is a social virtue, a lot of people apply it indiscriminately, and so they wind up wasting time on long-debunked ideas.
“In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.”
How many people want to exercise government-type power over large numbers of people? A lot of people are, apparently, happy to let someone else tell them what to do. Most of the rest aren’t very ambitious.
“Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it.”
(remembers childhood)
When adults did tell me this, I didn’t believe them- after all, wasn’t it blatantly obvious that there was a strong negative correlation between intelligence and quality of life?
“The best part about math is that, if you have the right answer and someone disagrees with you, it really is because they’re stupid.”
This is true, but only for arbitrarily low values of “stupid”. There are plenty of theorems which are obvious for a superintelligence, but counterintuitive to humans.
“Long-Term Capital Management had faith in diversification. Its history serves as ample notification that eggs in different baskets can and do all break at the same time.”
If I recall correctly, LTCM was so highly leveraged that most of their eggs didn’t have to break- if just 10% or so did, they were hosed anyway.
“Ask anyone, and they’ll say the same thing: they’re pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong.”
I generally find myself arguing against open-mindedness; because “open-mindedness” is a social virtue, a lot of people apply it indiscriminately, and so they wind up wasting time on long-debunked ideas.
“In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.”
How many people want to exercise government-type power over large numbers of people? A lot of people are, apparently, happy to let someone else tell them what to do. Most of the rest aren’t very ambitious.
“Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it.”
(remembers childhood)
When adults did tell me this, I didn’t believe them- after all, wasn’t it blatantly obvious that there was a strong negative correlation between intelligence and quality of life?
“The best part about math is that, if you have the right answer and someone disagrees with you, it really is because they’re stupid.”
This is true, but only for arbitrarily low values of “stupid”. There are plenty of theorems which are obvious for a superintelligence, but counterintuitive to humans.
“Long-Term Capital Management had faith in diversification. Its history serves as ample notification that eggs in different baskets can and do all break at the same time.”
If I recall correctly, LTCM was so highly leveraged that most of their eggs didn’t have to break- if just 10% or so did, they were hosed anyway.