"To overstate it: The scientists hated incommensurability because it seemed to imply that science makes no real progress, the philosophers hated it because it seemed to imply that there is no truth, and the positivists hated it because it seemed to imply that science is based on nonrational decisions."
David Weinberger on Thomas Kuhn
All right, here is how I feel about whiskey:
My friends, I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about whiskey. All right, here is how I feel about whiskey:
If when you say whiskey you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.
But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.
This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.
Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat, Jr., via Cheap Talk
"Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown — the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none."
"I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. “No,” he replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."
"It was my experience that people approached an online purchase of six dollars with the same deliberation and thoughtfulness they might bring to bear when buying a new car. Prospective users would hand-wring for weeks on Twitter and send us closely-worded, punctilious lists of questions before creating an account."
"you might even say there is a market for ‘useless’ post-graduate education in the United States,” and indeed you might — but we should question whether the word “market” in these sorts of statements is doing the amount of redemptive work many market-based normative social theories seem to believe it’s doing."
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There are two reasons why the rationality assumption is popular in economic modelling:
It works an awful lot of the time, in that it is a good predictor of human behaviour.
It provides models which are falsifiable.
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As an anthropologist, it’s kind of a professional pet peeve. We’ve been looking for this mythical land of barter for the last 200 years, so we would have found it by now … The spot trade, where it’s in the moment and you never see each other again, this is the opposite of any kind of exchange in primitive economies. In order to create the idea that life is just a series of exchanges we can all walk away from - a very antisocial notion of what people are about - you have to eradicate all obligations that people have to each other. …
Credit money is the original form, and then you have this 1,000-year period where coins come mainly out of the building of empires and to pay soldiers, and then when the empires go, the coins do too. In the Middle Ages you go back to credit systems, very sophisticated in some times and places. Then we have another time of bullion money, since the 16th or 17th century, and that’s what’s going away now.
""When building our models, the distinction between rational and irrational is irrelevant. What matters is that are models are a good predictor of human behaviour and they are falsifiable."
"The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching search-lights."
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance
