dlthomas comments on How to Draw Conclusions Like Sherlock Holmes - Less Wrong

-5 Post author: abcd_z 27 December 2011 01:29PM

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Comment author: dlthomas 28 December 2011 01:21:32AM 1 point [-]

I was not demanding 100% certainty, I was demanding reasonable certainty. I am certainly not a scholar of the period, but I have done more than a little reading of my own, and my recalled interpretation clearly differs from yours. I don't know if we'll get further without citing sources in detail.

Comment author: Thomas 28 December 2011 01:03:48PM 1 point [-]

I did some readings, too! Socrates, for example, refers to accusations of being a believer in a Moon as a rock as ridiculous. For those ideas were commonly known as cheap and can be (text) bought on the market in Athens for a little money. Socrates was not keen for a cheap knowledge to distribute.

At least, that was his defense.

My dear Meletus, do you think you are prosecuting Anaxagoras? Are you so contemptuous of the jury and think them so ignorant of letters as not to know that the books of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae are full of those theories, and further, that the young men learn from me what they can buy from time to time for a drachma, at most, in the bookshops, and ridicule Socrates if he pretends that these theories are his own, especially as they are so absurd? (26d)