Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake
amazon.com
There is, however, another kind of duty involved: something that philosophers call epistemic duty. This is the duty to subject one’s beliefs to the appropriate amount of critical scrutiny: to examine whether they are warranted by the available evidence and to at least attempt to ascertain whether or not there exists any countervailing evidence.
... See moreMark Rowlands • The Philosopher and the Wolf
Liberal science, to Rauch, is a system that applies two consistent rules: the “skeptical rule” and the “empirical rule.”17 These he summarizes as “no one gets the final say” and “no one has personal authority,”18 respectively, arguing that “these peculiar rules are two of the most successful social conventions the human species has ever evolved.”19
... See moreHelen Pluckrose • Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
In his book Pale Blue Dot, my dad wrote, “Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity. Where we are ignorant, we withhold belief. Whatever annoyance the uncertainty engenders serves a higher purpose. It drives us to accumulate better data.”
Sasha Sagan • For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World
My parents taught me that there has never been any correlation between how true something was and how fervently it was believed.
Sasha Sagan • For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World
Thus, in searching for and judging explanations, we need more than just a refutation of solipsism. We need to develop reasons for accepting or rejecting the existence of entities that may appear in contending theories; in other words, we need a criterion for reality.
