Enemy of Entropy
Archive for Thought of the Day
TotD: Ray Kurzweil on Change
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
Centuries ago people didn’t think that the world was changing at all. Their grandparents had the same lives that they did, and they expected their grandchildren would do the same, and that expectation was largely fulfilled.
Today it’s an axiom that life is changing and that technology is affecting the nature of society. What’s not fully understood is that the pace of change is itself accelerating, and the last 20 years are not a good guide to the next 20 years. We’re doubling the paradigm shift rate, the rate of progress, every decade.
The whole 20th century was like 25 years of change at today’s rate of change. In the next 25 years we’ll make four times the progress you saw in the 20th century. And we’ll make 20,000 years of progress in the 21st century, which is almost a thousand times more technical change than we saw in the 20th century.
TotD: Suggested Rules for Democratic Discourse
14 August 2008, 11:55 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under Thought of the Day.Sidney Hook, suggested rules for democratic discourse, from “The Ethics of Controversy,” Sidney Hook on Pragmatism, Democracy and Freedom: The Essential Essays:
- Nothing and no one is immune from criticism.
- Everyone involved in a controversy has an intellectual responsibility to inform himself of the available facts.
- Criticism should be directed first to policies, and against persons only when they are responsible for policies, and against their motives or purposes only when there is some independent evidence of their character.
- [Just] Because certain words are legally permissible, they are not therefore morally permissible.
- Before impugning an opponent’s motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments.
- Do not treat an opponent of a policy as if he were therefore a personal enemy of the country or a concealed enemy of democracy.
- Since a good cause may be defended by bad arguments, after answering the bad arguments for another’s position present positive evidence for your own.
- Do not hesitate to admit lack of knowledge or to suspend judgment if evidence is not decisive either way.
- Only in pure logic and mathematics, not in human affairs, can one demonstrate that something is strictly impossible. Because something is logically possible, it is not therefore probable. “It is not impossible” is a preface to an irrelevant statement about human affairs. The question is always one of the balance of probabilities. And the evidence for probabilities must include more than abstract possibilities.
- The cardinal sin, when we are looking for truth of fact or wisdom of policy, is refusal to discuss, or action which blocks discussion.
ToTD: Fran Lebowitz
17 July 2008, 4:31 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under Thought of the Day.Take away a man’s actual sense of manhood – which is conventionally based on the ability to work, to earn money, to be self-sufficient, to provide for children – and you’ve got to give them something else. And they did.
This hideous religion that’s all over the country – these huge church-malls – that’s what substitutes for these lost towns. But that’s not a town. That’s a cult. A town is diverse, in a real way, not in this fake way we have now. A community is a butcher and a doctor, a minister, a town troublemaker. A ‘community’ is not a bunch of people united by some grievance. That’s just self-righteousness – incredibly dangerous and antidemocratic. People have become so rigid; their opinions seem to them like themselves. When that happens (and it has happened) people can’t change their minds. If you are identified by your opinions – if that is the very basis of yourself – how can you change your mind?
Fran Lebowitz, Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (August/September 2005)
TotD: Doris Lessing on Education
Doris Lessing, Introduction to The Golden Notebook
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:
“You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself – educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
TotD: Emma Goldman on Love
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.
Emma Goldman, “Marriage and Love,” Anarchism and Other Essays (1911)
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