Nothing in the methods or practices of science guarantees success. But we have a capacity to observe, theorize, measure, and test; and these abilities are crucial to our human ability to navigate an uncertain world. So we should look at the institutions and findings of science much as pragmatists like Israel Scheffler and WVO Quine did: as imperfect but valuable tools on the basis of which to learn some of the more important properties and dynamics of the world around us.
Category Archives: Thought for the Day
Thought for the Day: 15 June 2015
Thought for the Day: 12 June 2015
There are many ways to speak falsehood and only one way to speak truth. It follows … that the truth is likely to become boring.
Thought for the Day: 11 June 2015
Talking about exports without considering imports is like keeping score in a baseball game by counting only the runs scored by the home team. It might make you feel good, but it won’t tell you who’s winning the game.
Thought for the Day: 6 June 2015
At this point, cremation is my best bet for getting a hot smoking body.
Thought for the Day: 5 June 2015
You sometimes find in non-literate cultures [the] development of the most extraordinary linguistic systems: often there’s tremendous sophistication about language, and people play all sorts of games with language.
What all these things look like is that people just want to use their intelligence somehow, and if you don’t have a lot of technology and so on, you do other things.
Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can’t get involved in them in a very serious way — so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports.
You’re trained to be obedient; you don’t have an interesting job; there’s no work around for you that’s creative; in the cultural environment you’re a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they’re in the hands of the rich folks. So what’s left? Well, one thing that’s left is sports — so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that. And I suppose that’s also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter.
Thought for the Day: 4 June 2015
Handing what we used to call The Commons over to private enterprises — especially private enterprises operating in the ethical wasteland of modern American corporations — doesn’t work. It is an invitation for the wolverines who run such enterprises to steal as much of the public treasury as they can and then stick us with the bill when they inevitably fail, because these corporations are not about building things. They’re about abetting the transfer of money upwards, to a stockholder class. They are vehicles for the financial services industry.
Thought for the Day: 2 June 2015
Two thoughts:
- I love Elizabeth Warren.
- In the segment above she reminds me of Lewis Black. Watch her hands. Like Black, those are the gestures of someone who’s genuinely angry. She’s not just angry though. She’s on a mission. (Re her mission, see Item #1.)
Thought for the Day: 1 June 2015
The Green Tea Coalition:
- Carolyn Kormann, Greening the Tea Party
- Jon Terbush, The Green Tea Coalition: Why the Sierra Club and the Georgia Tea Party keep teaming up
- Ashton Pittman, Launch of Green Tea Coalition Drives A Wedge Through Georgia’s Tea Party
- Debbie Dooley, A Tea Party leader explains why she’s teaming up with the Sierra Club to push for solar power
Thought for the Day: Every Day
Frequent locally-owned businesses.