Many false beliefs are instrumental, but no one holds them instrumentally.
Aug 242020
Erring
Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.
—Cunningham
Jul 312020
If you think you would rather be right and despised than wrong and beloved, you are wrong.
Jul 102020
It requires only belief in a few fashionable ideas to make the world a place of endless wonder and constant surprise.
Jun 042020
When intelligence is no longer required for survival, it is instead expended on ever more baroque ways of being wrong.
May 222020
Just as there are ideas so mad that you must be clever to believe them, so there is behavior so weird that you must be clever to engage in it.
Apr 282020
No matter how bad your argument is, you can be sure it’s not original.
Apr 202020
There are no double standards, only invidious criteria.
Apr 132020
There is small reason to believe, outside of a few specialized fields, that a proposition is correct because it can be persuasively argued for.
Jan 172020
It is natural, if you believe that speech is violence, to believe that violence is speech.
Jan 082020
There’s no shame in being wrong, only in not paying for it.