So apparently Richard Feynman once said:
If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence you will see an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.
I could be missing something, but this strikes me as a terrible answer.
When was the atomic hypothesis confirmed? If I recall correctly, it was only when chemists started noticing that the outputs of chemical reactions tended to factorize a certain way, which is to say that it took millennia after Democritus to get the point where the atomic hypothesis started making clearly relevant experimental predictions.
How about, "Stop trying to sound wise and come up with theories that make precise predictions about things you can measure in numbers."
I noticed this on Marginal Revolution, so I shall also state my candidate for the one most important sentence about macroeconomics: "You can't eat gold, so figure out how the heck money is relevant to making countries actually produce more or less food." This is a pretty large advance on how kings used to think before economics. I mean, Scott Sumner is usually pretty savvy (so is Richard Feynman btw) but his instruction to try to understand money is likely to fall on deaf ears, if it's just that one sentence. Think about money? Everyone wants more money! Yay, money! Let's build more gold mines! And "In the short run, governments are not households"? Really, Prof. Cowen, that's what you'd pass on to the next generation as they climb up from the radioactive soil?
*Cough.* Okay, I'm done. Does anyone want to take their own shot at doing better than Feynman did for their own discipline?
I want prostitution legalized. Most people don't. This is because I don't think selling sex is immoral. I don't terminally disvalue it. I could make arguments like "Prostitution would be a lot safer if it was legal," which are correct. But it would also probably be more common, and I bet some of my opposition thinks that the extra sex-selling is worse than the STDs legalization would get rid of (especially because they would be inflicted upon people who "deserved" it.). So this is a terminal value disagreement.
I suspect a lot of the other political issues where my opponents say "immoral" are basically just terminal value disputes. Gay marriage springs to mind.
Drugs are less of terminal value dispute, because most of the arguing I've heard is either "If they are legal, they will be less dangerous," or "If they are legal, more irrational people will foolishly hurt themselves."
Economic issues appear at first glance to be mostly factual disputes, but I think the factual arguments people give are rationalizations, and terminal value disputes between fairness and property rights are a big part of them too.
These are just the arguments I hear people talking about today in the US. There are much bigger disputes in the past.
For example, the argument over slavery in the US was basically one over terminal values. Do you care non-negligibly about brown people or not? The people who whipped slaves were probably more familiar with the facts than the abolitionists. Most of them probably thought something like "This is the natural order of things." or "God approves," but the natural order and gods approval are not terminal values for a lot of people.
See the other thread descending from parent where TimS and I discussed a bit. I think we dissolved the "terminal values" thing nicely.