= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
MichaelGR comments on Rationality Quotes: November 2010 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (354)
It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful, they are found because it was possible to find them. -J. Robert Oppenheimer.
There are two quite different interpretations of this quote: it either says something about scientists, or something about scientific truths, and I'm not sure which is the intention.
The two messages I see are:
Scientists just enjoy seeking truths, you don't need to give them the incentive of practical applications in order for them to do science, so any truths that can be discovered will be, regardless of their usefulness.
There are an awful lot of true things. The ones that we know might not be the most useful, but they are the ones that happen to lie in the (extremely small?) subset of true things that humans are capable of understanding.
To an extent, I guess both of these are true... which one was Oppenheimer aiming at?
Quibble: Two things you might have missed:
<quote>There are an awful lot of true things. </quote>
I think that many of the things that are commonly regarded as being "true" are socially constructed fictions, biases and fallacies. Moreover science can never attain absolute truth it can only strive for it.
Hi stochastic, and welcome to Less Wrong!
This is actually a really important topic. I agree that there are a lot of cultural and normative claims that don't deserve to be called "true" or "false", despite their common usage as such. I'd be cautious of using the phrase "absolute truth", since it conjures up false expectations compared to the actual process of increasing confidence in models of the world.
Really relevant: The Simple Truth
P.S. Introduce yourself on the welcome page when you have a moment!
The quote syntax is
Which becomes
Profound, necessary and optimistic. :)