brian_jaress comments on Rationality Quotes - September 2009 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: thomblake 01 September 2009 03:06PM

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Comment author: brian_jaress 03 September 2009 08:07:54AM 2 points [-]

Great thinkers build their edifices with subtle consistency. We do our intellectual forebears an enormous disservice when we dismember their visions and scan their systems in order to extract a few disembodied “gems”—thoughts or claims still accepted as true. These disarticulated pieces then become the entire legacy of our ancestors, and we lose the beauty and coherence of older systems that might enlighten us by their unfamiliarity—and their consequent challenge—in our fallible (and complacent) modern world.

-- Stephen Jay Gould

Comment author: RichardKennaway 06 September 2009 06:23:52PM 0 points [-]

Do you have the context for that one? My immediate reaction is to suspect that Gould wants to rehabilitate some discarded old idea, and talks about consistency, beauty and coherence as a way of not talking about evidence and truth. But perhaps I am too suspicious.

Comment author: brian_jaress 07 September 2009 02:24:28AM 0 points [-]

I don't have the context for that particular wording, but it's a recurring theme of his essays. He felt that wrong ideas could still be instructive, and he would often write essays explaining ideas that he clearly referred to as incorrect.

His point here seems to be that the theory is already wrong, so don't destroy the remaining value by cutting it up to extract the bits you could get from current theory. I don't think you need to worry that he's calling for a return to something you dislike.

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