I’m interested in reading anything that can change my mind, but avoid some partisan stuff when it looks like it’s “preaching to the choir” and that it assumes that the reader already agrees with the conclusions.
Yes, if you’re not young, impressionable and overidealistic. Trotsky was an incredible writer, and reading that book you do really see things from the perspective of an insider.
One of the reactionary and therefore fashionable historians in contemporary France, L. Madelin, slandering in his drawing-room fashion the great revolution – that is, the birth of his own nation – asserts that “the historian ought to stand upon the wall of a threatened city, and behold at the same time the besiegers and the besieged”: only in this way, it seems, can he achieve a “conciliatory justice.” However, the words of Madelin himself testify that if he climbs out on the wall dividing the two camps, it is only in the character of a reconnoiterer for the reaction. It is well that he is concerned only with war camps of the past: in a time of revolution standing on the wall involves great danger. Moreover, in times of alarm the priests of “conciliatory justice” are usually found sitting on the inside of four walls waiting to see which side will win.
The serious and critical reader will not want a treacherous impartiality, which offers him a cup of conciliation with a well-settled poison of reactionary hate at the bottom, but a scientific conscientiousness, which for its sympathies and antipathies – open and undisguised – seeks support in an honest study of the facts, a determination of their real connections, an exposure of the causal laws of their movement. That is the only possible historic objectivism, and moreover it is amply sufficient, for it is verified and attested not by the good intentions of the historian, for which only he himself can vouch, but the natural laws revealed by him of the historic process itself.
Your brain cannot be trusted. It is not safe. You must be careful with what you put into it, because it will decide the output, not you.
This “it” may, or even should, relate to the idea itself. The same idea, the same meme, put into a healthy rational brains anywhere, will decide the same! Since the brains are just a rational machine always doing the best possible thing.
It is the input, what decides the output. Machine has no other (irrational) choices, than to process the input best way it can, and then to spit out the output.
It is not my calculator only, which outputs “12” to the input “5+7″. It is every unbroken calculator in the world, which outputs the same.
So again. The input “decides” what the output should be, not the computer (brains).
Interesting—would you recommend others read it?
I’m interested in reading anything that can change my mind, but avoid some partisan stuff when it looks like it’s “preaching to the choir” and that it assumes that the reader already agrees with the conclusions.
Yes, if you’re not young, impressionable and overidealistic. Trotsky was an incredible writer, and reading that book you do really see things from the perspective of an insider.
This “it” may, or even should, relate to the idea itself. The same idea, the same meme, put into a healthy rational brains anywhere, will decide the same! Since the brains are just a rational machine always doing the best possible thing.
It is the input, what decides the output. Machine has no other (irrational) choices, than to process the input best way it can, and then to spit out the output.
It is not my calculator only, which outputs “12” to the input “5+7″. It is every unbroken calculator in the world, which outputs the same.
So again. The input “decides” what the output should be, not the computer (brains).