“Pinker told us he wanted to have entered into the record Kahneman’s statements on the irrationality of much of human thought. I don't think of religious traditions primarily as irrational, I think of them primarily as imagination, which is what they are” https://www.edge.org/conversation/elaine_pagels-the-social-history-of-religion …
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The history and philosophy of science are excellent teachers of the value of irrationality. Quantum mechanics would never have emerged from a community of practitioners with no tolerance for the irrational in scientific investigation. The Bohr atom was obviously contradictory.
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Even Dirac, who was hardly a wild-eyed mystic, insisted that real breakthroughs come only from recognizing that heretofore-unquestioned assumptions may be essentially wrong. The real challenge is to identify unknown unknowns -- which takes a certain wildness of mind.
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