Don’t ingest words from a poisoned discourse unless you have a concrete reason to think you’re immune.
Politics is often poisoned deliberately. Other topics are sometimes poisoned accidentally, by concentrated confusion. Gibberish is toxic; if you bend your mind to make sense of it, your whole mind warps slightly. You see concentrated confusion every time you watch a science fiction show on television; their so-called science is actually made from mad libs. Examples are everywhere; do not assume that there is meaning beneath all confusion.
Here’s the exact opposite advice. I wouldn’t even bother posting it here except it’s from one of the major rationalists of the 20th century:
“In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held.… Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true. This exercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind.”
—Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
Don’t ingest words from a poisoned discourse unless you have a concrete reason to think you’re immune.
Politics is often poisoned deliberately. Other topics are sometimes poisoned accidentally, by concentrated confusion. Gibberish is toxic; if you bend your mind to make sense of it, your whole mind warps slightly. You see concentrated confusion every time you watch a science fiction show on television; their so-called science is actually made from mad libs. Examples are everywhere; do not assume that there is meaning beneath all confusion.
Here’s the exact opposite advice. I wouldn’t even bother posting it here except it’s from one of the major rationalists of the 20th century:
“In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held.… Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true. This exercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind.” —Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
I think Russell was right that this is a powerful technique, but he was also naive about the heuristics & biases addendum to classical rationalism.
So he is recommending a technique that is very useful but also epistemically dangerous.
That is very well put.