“Tell me,” the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once asked a friend, “why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the sun went around the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?”
His friend replied, “Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going around the Earth.”
Wittgenstein responded, “Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?”
Mm. If you had googled for ‘wittgenstein earth’, which seems to me to be the most obvious search phrase, you would’ve found 2 links on the first page...
Yes, clearly my Google-fu is lacking. I think I searched for phrases like “sun went around the Earth,” which fails because your quote has “sun went round the Earth.”
There’s your problem, you got overly specific. When you’re formulating a search, you want to balance how many hits you get—the broader your formulation, the more likely the hits will include your target (if it exists) but the more hits you’ll return.
In this case, my reasoning would go something like this, laid out explicitly: ‘”Wittgenstein” is almost guaranteed to be on the same page as any instance of this quote, since the quote is about Wittgenstein; LW, however, doesn’t discuss Wittgenstein very much, so there won’t be many hits in the first place; to find this quote, I only need to narrow down those hits a little, and after “Wittgenstein”, the most fundamental core word to this quote is “Earth” or “sun”, so I’ll toss one of them in and… ah, there’s the quote.’
If I were searching the general Internet, my reasoning would go more like “‘Wittgenstein’ will be on like a million websites; I need to narrow that down a lot more to hope to find it; so maybe ‘Wittgenstein’ and ‘Earth’ and ‘Sun’… nope nothing on the first page, toss in ‘goes around’ OR ‘go around’, ah there it is!”
(Actually, for the general Internet, just ‘Wittgenstein earth sun’ turns up a first page mostly about this quote, several of which include all the details one could need aside from Dawkins’s truncated version.)
-related by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion
Versions of this quote have been posted twice before; the best version of the quote includes the friend’s reply to Wittgenstein: http://lesswrong.com/lw/94r/rationality_quotes_january_2012/5kib
Thanks; I thought it was likely to have been posted, but I tried to search for it and didn’t find it.
Mm. If you had googled for ‘wittgenstein earth’, which seems to me to be the most obvious search phrase, you would’ve found 2 links on the first page...
Yes, clearly my Google-fu is lacking. I think I searched for phrases like “sun went around the Earth,” which fails because your quote has “sun went round the Earth.”
There’s your problem, you got overly specific. When you’re formulating a search, you want to balance how many hits you get—the broader your formulation, the more likely the hits will include your target (if it exists) but the more hits you’ll return.
In this case, my reasoning would go something like this, laid out explicitly: ‘”Wittgenstein” is almost guaranteed to be on the same page as any instance of this quote, since the quote is about Wittgenstein; LW, however, doesn’t discuss Wittgenstein very much, so there won’t be many hits in the first place; to find this quote, I only need to narrow down those hits a little, and after “Wittgenstein”, the most fundamental core word to this quote is “Earth” or “sun”, so I’ll toss one of them in and… ah, there’s the quote.’
If I were searching the general Internet, my reasoning would go more like “‘Wittgenstein’ will be on like a million websites; I need to narrow that down a lot more to hope to find it; so maybe ‘Wittgenstein’ and ‘Earth’ and ‘Sun’… nope nothing on the first page, toss in ‘goes around’ OR ‘go around’, ah there it is!”
(Actually, for the general Internet, just ‘Wittgenstein earth sun’ turns up a first page mostly about this quote, several of which include all the details one could need aside from Dawkins’s truncated version.)
Like I was standing still and the earth was rotating.