A lot of the current education system aims to give children skills that they can apply to the job market as it existed 20 years ago or so. I think children would be better-advised to master more general skills that could be applied to a range of possible rapidly changing worlds: character skills like resilience, flexibility, industriousness, rationality, social responsibility, attention, caution, etc.
Come to think of it, such skills probably represent more reliable "investments" for us grown-ups too.
Done. Thanks for the correction.
It seems plausible to me that there is a sort of selection process in which people are creating ostensible-wisdom all the time, but only some of that wisdom gets passed along to the next generation, and the next, and so forth, while a lot of it gets discarded. If some example of wisdom is indeed ancient, then you can by virtue of that have at least some evidence that it has passed through this selection process.
To what extent this selection process selects for wisdom that actually earns that designation I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.
We taboo resemblance all the time for things that refer to other things: Words, for example. The word "mouse" does not resemble a mouse, but we can usefully use the word as a reference. Words that resemble their references are a peculiar and remarkable tiny category (onomatopoeia) that are the exception to the rule.
If you thought your computer interface were an accurate picture of what is going on inside the computer, you might indeed go looking for a microscopic pointer somewhere in the wires. It's because you don't think this that you know to look for correspondences and representations instead. Hoffman's point is that we don't tend to do this with things like space, time, matter, etc.: we think those things in our interface-with-reality correspond to the same sorts of things in reality-under-the-hood (space, time, matter, etc.). He believes we're mistaken.
It's not nonsensical. It's an assertion that can be made sense of with a little effort.
Consider the user interface analogy. On your desktop there is a mouse pointer with which you can drag a file from here to there. In the underlying computer which executes the actions which are represented by this interface, there is nothing that resembles a pointer, a dragging action, or a file. That the interface associates certain activity in the hardware with certain things that appear on the desktop is a useful convention for us, but it is not one that was designed to give us an accurate notion of what is taking place inside the machine. Hoffman suggests that the same thing is true of the interface-reality we perceive and the real-reality underneath. The interface-reality was "designed" by natural selection to be a useful convention for us as we interact with the real-reality which is not apparent to us.
shame—no need to exacerbate such feelings if it can be avoided
Shame may be an important tool that people with dark traits can leverage to overcome those traits. Exacerbating it may in some cases be salutary.
To me, the phrase “I decided to trust her” throws an error. It’s the “decided” part that’s the problem: beliefs are not supposed to involve any “deciding”.
To trust is more than a passive cognitive reflection like a belief, it is also an action taken upon the world. This might be more easily seen if you consider the more awkward phrasing "I decided to extend my trust to her".
“So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” ―Benjamin Franklin (Autobiography Ⅳ, 1791)
An influential ethical philosopher is on his way to address a conference of wealthy donors about effective altruism. His rhetorical power and keen arguments are such that he can expect these donors to reach deep and double their donations to yet worthier causes after his talk. On his way to the conference, however, he comes across a child drowning in a pond. He is the only one around who can save this child, but to do so, he would have to jump in the pond, ruin his humble but respectable second-hand suit, and miss the train to the conference. While he would certainly have a good excuse to give to the donors, before he would have the opportunity to do so they would probably leave the conference feeling resentful at the waste of their valuable time, rather than generous and inspired. He figures he can save more lives by letting the child drown and instead catching his train to the conference, so he turns his back on the pond.