Dennett’s Law of Needy Readers
On any important topic, we tend to have a dim idea of what we hope to be true, and when an author writes the words we want to read, we tend to fall for it, no matter how shoddy the arguments. Needy readers have an asymptote at illiteracy; if a text doesn’t say the one thing they need to read, it might as well be in a foreign language. To be open-minded, you have to recognize, and counteract, your own doxastic hungers.
From the 2004 Edge Annual Question.
[x]#345 fan zaterdag 3 januari 2004 @ 12:37:48
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2 kommentaren
lieuwe op 7 januari 2004 @ 09:30:48
Der is der dan:
According to Alan Alda:
The following is written by a non-scientist who supposes it might be entertaining for scientists to see what passes through the head of a curious layman while trying to understand the people who try to understand Nature.
Alda’s First Law of Laws
All laws are local.
In other words, something is always bound to come along and make you rethink what you know by forcing you to look at it in a broader context. I’ve arrived at this notion after interviewing hundreds of scientists, and also after being married for 46 years.
I don’t mean that laws are not true and useful, especially when they have been verified by experiment. But they are likely to continue to be true only within a certain frame, once another frame is discovered.
Some scientists will probably find this idea heretical and others may find it obvious. According to this law, they’ll both be right (depending on the frame they’re working in).
Another way of saying this is that no matter how much we know about something, it is just the tip of the iceberg. And most disasters occur by coming in contact with the other part of the iceberg.
Alda’s Second Law of Laws
A law does not know how local it is.
Citizens of Lawville do not realize there are city limits and are constantly surprised to find out they live in a county.
When you’re operating within the frame of a law, you can’t know where the edges of the frame are where dragons begin showing up.
I’ve just been interviewing astronomers about dark matter and dark energy in the universe. These two things make up something like 96% of the universe. The part of the universe we can see or in some way observe is only about 4%. That leaves a lot of universe that needs to be rethought. And some people speculate that dark energy may be leaking in from a whole other universe; an even bigger change of frame, if that turns out to be the case.
Its now known that vast stretches of DNA once thought to be Junk DNA because they dont code for proteins actually regulate or even silence conventional genes. The conventional geneswhat we used to think were responsible for everything we knew about heritabilityaccount for only 2% of our DNA. Apparently, its not yet known how much of the other 98% is active, but I think the frame has just shifted here.
Welcome to Lawville; you are now leaving Lawville.
lieuwe op 6 januari 2004 @ 19:04:04
No moat ik earst oan it bestudearjen, in sekuere lezer moat al goed witte, der t it oer giet.