“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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Replying to @EmanuelDerman
I think what's needed is a rehabilitation of irrationality. It gets a bad rap, and doesn't deserve much of the opprobrium leveled at it. Nietzsche was right to celebrate the Dionysian tendency in human thinking and feeling. Yes, it is untidy and strange, but productive.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @EmanuelDerman
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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Replying to @MathPrinceps @EmanuelDerman
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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Replying to @MathPrinceps
“Accordingly, genius is the capacity to remain in a state of pure perception, to lose oneself in perception, to remove from the service of the will the knowledge which originally existed only for this service.” Schopenhauer
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Replying to @EmanuelDerman
"When a person works, he must have knowledge or he will make terrible mistakes. But at the same time, knowledge alone doesn’t do anything new. You must have instinct and somehow be conscious of making use of instinct." ~ Heisuke Hironaka
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Replying to @MathPrinceps
Yes. Also https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/37763-improvement-makes-strait-roads-but-the-crooked-roads-without-improvement … If you’ve ever tried to create something new you realize that logic takes you only so far ( in most cases, to be honest)
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Replying to @EmanuelDerman
"One of the reasons we don’t do as well as we should is that we are all over-taught." ~ Israel Moiseevich Gelfand
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"Logic tells us that on such and such a way we are certain not to meet any obstacle; it does not say which way leads to the end. For that it is necessary to see the end from afar, and the faculty which teaches us to see is intuition." ~ Henri Poincaré
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @EmanuelDerman
"To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better." ~ Henri Poincaré
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @EmanuelDerman
"Discovery is the privilege of the child: the child who has no fear of being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being serious, of not doing things like everyone else." ~ Alexander Grothendieck
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