Saved by Stuart Evans and
Philosophy, Not Science
Most of the institutions that you or I interact with have deeply internalized the belief that, to be legitimate, knowledge must be gathered empirically and verified by an expert. We have become collectively dependent on third-party, professional expertise, and in the process, our basic human capacities for self-reflection, creative intuition, and s
... See moreCarol Sanford • No More Gold Stars: Regenerating Capacity to Think for Ourselves
The problem is that, without a proper method, empirical observations can lead you astray. Hume came to warn us against such knowledge, and to stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge—what is called epistemology (from episteme, Greek for learning).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb • Incerto 4-Book Bundle
Throughout even the most recent applications of Theory, then, we see radical skepticism that knowledge can be objectively, universally, or neutrally true. This leads to a belief that rigor and completeness come not from good methodology, skepticism, and evidence, but from identity-based “standpoints” and multiple “ways of knowing.”
Helen Pluckrose • Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
Our current epistemology—dominated by a physicalist, reductive, Cartesian science—is unequipped to recognize anything real that isn’t measurable by matter. It insists consciousness must be a function of neurons and nothing else. It assumes life must emerge from biology, even though we now simulate biology with code.
But the cracks in that worldview ... See more
But the cracks in that worldview ... See more
Intellectualism is the belief that one can separate an action from the results of such action, that one can separate theory from practice, and that one can always fix a complex system by hierarchical approaches, that is, in a (ceremonial) top-down manner. Intellectualism has a sibling: scientism, a naive interpretation of science as complication ra
... See more