“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” – Mark Twain If everyone believes it’s true, it’s probably not — I call this The Popularity Principle. The Popularity Principle applies particularly well to art and entertainment, which is why I never watch celebrity award shows and I… [Read More]
Friends Are Not Bound by Belief, OR, Argument is Good
“A friend is not somebody one trusts to behave in a certain manner… he [she] is somebody who engages the imagination.” That’s Michael Oakeshott, in his essay On being conservative. He is one of my favorite conservative political philosophers. And I try to engage with his ideas often to keep a good solid check on… [Read More]
Penetration: Mathematics & Philosophy – Quote: Leibniz
Without mathematics we cannot penetrate deeply into philosophy. Without philosophy we cannot penetrate deeply into mathematics. Without both we cannot penetrate deeply into anything. — Leibniz … he said, “penetrate”. Now go lift something heavy, Nick Horton
Truth: 2 Rules of Thumb – Scientific Consensus vs Popular Opinion
I never give a crap what other people’s “opinions” are. I DO care about what is TRUE. Throughout history, popular opinion has usually been on the WRONG side of the truth — especially when it comes to anything ethical. From science to slavery, humans have gotten nearly everything wrong. The reason we had to invent… [Read More]
Self-Deception – Bishop Butler: Quote
“Things and actions are what they are, and their consequences will be what they will be: why then should we seek to be deceived?” — Bishop Butler The Romantic personality type can handle anything — save for the facts. I deplore this tendency in our lowly species; even more so its rampantness, and its promotion… [Read More]
How to Read Like a Slap to the Face & a Handful of Blood – Zhu Xi: Quote of the Day
“Here’s what is necessary: one blow with a club, one scar; one slap to the face, a handful of blood. Your reading of what other people write should be like this. Don’t be lax!” — Zhu Xi Zhu Xi has been, perhaps, the most influential commentator on the Confucian classics in history. If you’ve ever… [Read More]
Herbert Gintis on Karl Popper: “Go Get’em Karl!”
Herbert Gintis is a game theorist, and the author of what is, in my opinion, the best beginner-book on Game Theory out there: Game Theory Evolving. Interestingly, he is also the author of a boat-load of Amazon book reviews. Here’s one he wrote for the book, The Myth of the Framework, a collection of Karl… [Read More]
Bertrand Russell on the Poverty of Wittgenstein
This is Bertrand Russell on Wittgenstein’s book Philosophical Investigations which had a profound influence on 20th century philosophy: (emphasis mine) “Its positive doctrines seem to me trivial and its negative doctrines unfounded. I have not found in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations anything that seemed to me interesting and I do not understand why a whole school… [Read More]
Bayesian Falsification – Andrew Gelman Paper
This Article by Andrew Gelman is one of the very few I’ve read that gets it right: we should be combining Falsification with Bayesian methods. I’ve called it Bayesian Falsification, he calls it Falsificationist Bayesian, but the point is the same. The Abstract: The classical or frequentist approach to statistics (in which inference is centered… [Read More]
Cicero via Franklin on Philosophy: Quote of the Day
“O vitae Philosophia dux! O virtutum indagatrix expultrixque vitiorum! Unus dies, bene et ex praeceptis tuis actus, peccanti immortalitati est anteponendus” translation (non-literal): “O philosophy, life’s guide! O searcher of virtues and expeller of vices! Just a single day lived well and according to your lessons is to be preferred to an eternity of errors.”… [Read More]
Western vs Eastern Training Philosophy :: Nemesis Q&A
I got this question in our 21 Day Squat Challenge Class: I don’t feel crappy enough. What can I do to push it? 1 Don’t laugh! 🙂 It’s a serious question in our world. It cuts to the core of an important mark of distinction between what most new people to serious training believe to… [Read More]
WARNING: Good Grades Make You Stupid – Wittgenstein & Ben Franklin
What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” — Wittgenstein This quote from Wittgenstein sounds reminiscent of the one your Grandmother used to say, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Like your Grandmother, he was a… [Read More]
A Violent, Sexy, Evil Note On My Political Philosophy (Sorry Grandma!)
A 3-Step Political Theory Recipe – How To Avoid Killing Each Other (Without Avoiding The Hard Stuff) Your Grandmother gave us some good advice: If you don’t have anything nice to say, keep your damned mouth shut, boy! OK, she didn’t say it precisely like that – that sounds more like your dad. But the… [Read More]
The Geometric Heart Of Darkness – Euclid’s FAIL (part 2)
In the last post, I discussed how Euclid made 3 huge mistakes. However, they were so subtle, so under-the-radar that it took over 2,000 years for anyone to take notice! I also explained that filling up these “holes” in Euclid is the foundation of what we now think of as the ‘formalization of mathematics’ or… [Read More]
Halloween, Scotch, & The Framing Effect – Why Humans Are Dumb
Act 1: The Origins Of Self & Style Most kids loved Halloween for the candy. I hated candy as a child. It hurt my stomach and hurt my teeth. My parents would “tax” us daily, one piece each per day per parent. Ostensibly this was to teach us about the real world. I suspect, in… [Read More]
Science Is Wrong? On The Under-Determination Of Fact – Samurai Strength Ep. 12
Does the sun revolve around the earth? No. Why did people believe such a crazy notion? Were they stupid? Of course not. The trouble with science is that it just doesn’t give us the level of certainty we humans seem to obsessively (and desperately) want. But don’t let that cause you to despair. Quite frankly, I… [Read More]