There is a certain type of purveyor of ideas, too stupid to be anything but candid, which makes him useful, like the canary in a coal mine.
Feb 262021
Thinking
Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
—Whitehead
Feb 182021
Every attack in the history of thought on the possibility of knowledge has been in service of beliefs that knowledge, were it possible, would immediately expose as false.
Feb 162021
The Opinion-Censors, who tell us what we must think, persuade only the dullest. The Topic-Censors, who tell us what we must think about, pass largely unnoticed. It is the Method-Censors, living and dead, who tell us how we must think, who hold us all hopelessly in their thrall.
Feb 022021
We smile at Aristotle for imbuing stones with agency, and ascribing to their affinity for the earth the effects of gravity; yet language almost compels us, when we speak of inanimate objects, to imply the same thing.
Jan 272021
Great problems are solved backwards: practice, then theory, and philosophical foundations, if ever, last of all.
Jan 182021
There is no problem high intelligence causes that higher intelligence can’t fix.
Jan 152021
The similarity in an analogy is the meat; the difference is the sauce.
Dec 302020
The distinguished Soviet geneticist Vavilov was unpersoned for refusing to reject heredity in favor of the neo-Lamarckism championed by Lysenko and Stalin, and I feel fortunate to live in a country where nothing like that could ever happen.
Dec 242020
We need not search for facts that confirm our opinions: all facts confirm our opinions.
Dec 112020
Most of the things we want to talk about are continuous, and most of the ways we have to talk about them are discrete.