RobertLumley comments on Rationality Quotes April 2012 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Oscar_Cunningham 03 April 2012 12:42AM

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Comment author: Alejandro1 02 April 2012 07:08:33PM 21 points [-]

On politics as the mind-killer:

We’re at the point where people are morally certain about the empirical facts of what happened between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman on the basis of their general political worldviews. This isn’t exactly surprising—we are tribal creatures who like master narratives—but it feels as though it’s gotten more pronounced recently, and it’s almost certainly making us all stupider.

-- Julian Sanchez (the whole post is worth reading)

Comment author: RobertLumley 03 April 2012 01:42:13AM 4 points [-]

It starts to seem, as Albert Camus once put it, that we’ve made the mind into an armed camp—in which not only politicians and legislative proposals, but moral philosophies, artworks, even scientific theories, have to wear the insignia of one or the other army

Does anyone know the exact quote to which he is referring here?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 03 April 2012 09:47:52PM 10 points [-]

We've reached the point where the weather is political, and so are third person pronouns.

Comment author: Multiheaded 10 April 2012 02:26:14PM 2 points [-]

Well, third-person pronouns were always political - it's just that only the last century's shift in values and ideological attitudes has allowed the spread of gender-neutral pronouns. Before that the issue was taken to be completely one-sided.

Comment author: hairyfigment 10 April 2012 02:33:39PM 1 point [-]

Conversely, evolution does not count as "political" here because we all belong to one camp. (Posted from Louisiana.)

Comment author: RobertLumley 03 April 2012 01:55:58AM 4 points [-]

I think it's this but I'm not sure:

The Greeks never made the human mind into an armed camp, and in this respect we are inferior to them.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 April 2012 03:46:26AM 8 points [-]

Tell that to Socrates.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 03 April 2012 09:55:58PM 4 points [-]

Given that they supposedly drowned people for discussing irrational numbers that seems false.

Comment author: ec429 07 April 2012 10:11:02PM -1 points [-]

Sorry to have to tell you this, but Pythagoras of Samos probably didn't even exist. More generally, essentially everything you're likely to have read about the Pythagoreans (except for some of their wacky cultish beliefs about chickens) is false, especially the stuff about irrationals. The Pythagoreans were an orphic cult, who (to the best of our knowledge) had no effect whatsoever on mainstream Greek mathematics or philosophy.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 08 April 2012 01:42:53AM 1 point [-]

Source?

Comment author: ec429 08 April 2012 02:04:04AM 0 points [-]

Well, my source is Dr Bursill-Hall's History of Mathematics lectures at Cambridge; I presume his source is 'the literature'. Sorry I can't give you a better source than that.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 April 2012 03:52:05AM 3 points [-]

Can anyone confirm this? Preferably with citation?

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