polymathwannabe comments on Rationality Quotes July 2014 - LessWrong

6 Post author: VAuroch 06 July 2014 06:51AM

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Comment author: polymathwannabe 13 July 2014 05:02:09PM 8 points [-]

The duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and,.. attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.

Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham

Comment author: RichardKennaway 14 July 2014 09:08:54AM 4 points [-]

I thought this sounded familiar (although that took a bit of work to find -- I wish the site had a better search facility than a Google form).

Comment author: TheMajor 13 July 2014 05:47:40PM 8 points [-]

This seems false - the quote illustrates that one should not believe everything just because it was written by a scientist, but there is also such a thing as being too skeptical. With a bit of effort you can deny pretty much any conclusion you dislike. Behaving as advised in this quote is better than taking scientists' word on blind faith, but in order to actually learn the truth from scientific writing you need to invest a lot more effort than just this!

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