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Human beings often cling to their certainties for fear that their opinions will be proven false. But a certainty that cannot be called into question is not a certainty. Solid certainties are those that survive questioning. In order to accept questioning as the foundation for our voyage toward knowledge, we must be humble enough to accept that

Exercise an unwavering commitment...to the principle that nothing - be it a religious claim, a scientific hypothesis, an assertion from the political Left or Right, or even humanist "affirmations" - is immune from critical examination and thoughtful analysis.

Here’s the top box of my GPT Custom Instructions. This is new—previous tweets have been the bottom box. They make me look like a blowhard but the AI doesn’t care: - I am Babak Nivi, Twitter user @nivi, the author of almost every post on https://t.co/5rBkt3WKXM, a... See more

Nivi x.com

Confronting questions:

Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?
Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation?
What do I think is true but is actually just good marketing?
What do I ignore because it’s too painful to accept?
Who has the right answers but I ignore

The philosopher Onora O’Neill once declared, “Well-placed trust grows out of active inquiry rather than blind acceptance.”

Tim Harford • The Data Detective

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances. If you think the task is easy, you will be disappointed—few humans have a natural ability to

Nassim Nicholas Taleb • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto Book 2)

i’ve always lived under the zero-trust principle (of my own mind); unless something is proven via external logic or (fuzzily) consensus, it sits in a superposition of “plausible” and “false”. even my own thoughts and senses operate like this

snwy x.com

truth is a problem now for everyone, if the idea seems empty or useless in ‘the era of social media’, ‘science denialism’, ‘conspiracy theories’ and suchlike, maybe that just means that ‘everyone’ has caught up to where philosophy was in 1922.

Crispin Sartwell • Truth Is Real and Philosophers Must Return Their Attention to It

"Citing studies that don't exist is NOT an 'error.' It is lying."