A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).
Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Just a few centuries ago, the smartest humans alive were dead wrong about damn near everything. They were wrong about gods. Wrong about astronomy. Wrong about disease. Wrong about heredity. Wrong about physics. Wrong about racism, sexism, nationalism, governance, and many other moral issues. Wrong about geology. Wrong about cosmology. Wrong about chemistry. Wrong about evolution. Wrong about nearly every subject imaginable.
This quote is mostly true, though the Islamic world was doing ok on the astronomy front before they decided to dive head-first into religious fundamentalism. But... what's the punchline ? Yes, all those people were wrong about all those things, but why is that fact important for us to know ? I could come up with some pretty compelling answers, but the quote itself doesn't say.
There are likely things about physics we're still wrong about, things about disease we're still wrong about, things about physics we're still wrong about, and so on, and so forth.
A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).