Weakly related epiphany: Hannibal Lector is the original prototype of an intelligence-in-a-box wanting to be let out, in “The Silence of the Lambs”
phaedrus
Karma: 117
”We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.” —Chris Mooney
This reminds me of “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”—Aristotle
To me, this uses “educated” in the sense it ought to be meant.
Learned helplessness, perhaps? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
”Fine phrases are the last resource of those who have run out of arguments.”—Peter Singer
“If anyone is going to ask for a real-world example of someone who does not know how a light switch works, I can’t provide one off the top of my head, but I’d suggest looking at this, which is even more dreadful.”
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” —Aristotle
“All of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”
---George Eliot, “Middlemarch”
I just realized today why they chose the name “GATTACA” for the eponymous movie.
“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.” —Goethe
“We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance”—John Archibald Wheeler
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”—Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
(This is not necessarily a rationalist quote, but yet, it kinda is :))
“Every conviction is a prison” ---- Nietzsche
Thanks RobinZ, The full quote is “Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything that we normally think, that you cannot for a moment suppose that is what we really mean when we say what we think.”
But the partial quote is much more crisp.
“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise”
Bertrand Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (Part of the full sentence)
“I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.”
Groucho Marx
I find this paper to be a good resource to think about this subject: https://motherjones.com/files/emotional_dog_and_rational_tail.pdf