RichardKennaway comments on Rationality quotes January 2012 - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Thomas 01 January 2012 10:28AM

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Comment author: MixedNuts 02 January 2012 02:20:33PM 13 points [-]

The ultimate theological question is: ‘Where does the Sun go at night?’.

The answer that so many civilisations agreed for so long was: ‘The Sun is driven by one of the gods, and at night it goes under the Earth to fight a battle. There is at least some risk that the god will lose this battle, and so the Sun may not rise tomorrow’. It’s something the human race understood was a cast iron fact before they knew how to cast iron. It survived as the working model twenty-five times longer than the four hundred years we’ve understood the Earth goes around the Sun.

Lance Parkin, Above us only sky

This is less a rationality quote than a "yay science" quote, but I find that impressive beyond words. For millenia that was a huge and frightening question, and then we went and answered it, and now it's too trivial to point out. We found out where the sun goes at night. I want to carve a primer on cosmology in gold letters on a mountain, entitled something in all caps along the lines of "HERE IS THE GLORY OF HUMANKIND".

Comment author: RichardKennaway 03 January 2012 01:19:03PM *  8 points [-]

It survived as the working model twenty-five times longer than the four hundred years we’ve understood the Earth goes around the Sun.

Is it excessive nitpicking to point out that the daily disappearance and reappearance of the Sun has to do with the Earth's rotation on its axis, not its rotation about the Sun? (Probably not, as the first comment on Parkin's blog posting points out the same.)

Comment author: Will_Newsome 04 January 2012 01:12:43AM *  5 points [-]

Is it excessive nitpicking to note that not only did he misuse the word "ultimate", he used it to mean basically the opposite of what it actually means?

Comment author: Daru 10 January 2012 06:15:46AM 1 point [-]

No. Thank you for inspiring me to look up the word and learn its true meaning.