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Whenever we see people who completely sacrifice everything for some cause, they are reliving a shift in values initiated by the early Christians of the first century, who revolutionized our way of thinking by devoting all aspects of life to some ideal. Whenever we fall in love and idealize the beloved, we are reliving the emotions that the troubadours of the twelfth century introduced into the Western world, a sentiment that had never existed before. Whenever we extol emotions and spontaneity over the intellect and effort, we are reexperiencing what the Romantic movements of the eighteenth century first introduced into our psychology. We are not aware of all this, but we in the present are motley products of all the accumulated changes in human thinking and psychology. By making the past into something dead, we are merely denying who we are. We become rootless and barbaric, disconnected from our nature.
The Laws of Human Nature
Robert Greene
The Veil of Ignorance : Create a constitution for a country as though you could wake up tomorrow in the body of any citizen, of any race, religion, or gender, and be forced to live as them in the society you've created. A central idea behind liberalism.
My Peoples, the Time Has...
@G_S_Bhogal on Twitter
Comic strip writer Randall Munroe illustrated some of the failings of this threshold for scientific publication: The comic shows some scientists testing whether jelly beans cause acne. After finding no link, someone recommends they test different colors individually. After going through numerous colors, from salmon to orange, none are found to be related to acne, except for one: The green jelly beans are found to be linked to acne, with a p-value less than 0.05. But how many colors were examined? Twenty. And yet, explaining that this might be due to chance does little to prevent the headline declaring jelly beans linked to acne. John Maynard Smith, a renowned evolutionary biologist, once pithily summarized this approach: “Statistics is the science that lets you do twenty experiments a year and publish one false result in Nature.”
The Half-Life of Facts
Samuel Arbesman
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