liveonearth: (Default)
 
 
 
Being ignorant
is not so much a shame
as being 
Unwilling to Learn.


--Benjamin Franklin
 
liveonearth: (Default)
To learn which questions are unanswerable,
and not to answer them:
This skill is most needful in times of
stress and darkness.


— Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Left Hand of Darkness.”
liveonearth: (Default)

 

"...growing up in church desensitizes you to logical inconsistencies, and that opens up large numbers of people to manipulation tactics employed by individuals and institutions keen on controlling groups of people for their own self-serving purposes."

 

—Neil Carter in How Faith Breaks Your Thinker 

APRIL 10, 2018

SOURCE: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2018/04/10/how-faith-breaks-your-thinker/

Excellent resource on logical inconsistencies:
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/

liveonearth: (Default)
 "Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."
--
Henry Louis Mencken in 'Notes On Journalism' in the Chicago Tribune (19 September 1926)
liveonearth: (Default)
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
--H.L. Mencken

One fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
--Robert Kennedy

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant threat winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
--Isaac Asimov

Democracy if four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
--Ambrose Bierce

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
--Winston S. Churchill 

The main problem in any democracy is that the crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage and whip their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy -- then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards than the tube for a nickel apiece.
--Hunter S. Thompson

Quotes from page 18 of the Funny Times, September 2017
liveonearth: (Homer Simpson "D'oh!")
The administration says the American people want tax cuts.

Well, duh.  The American people also want drive-through nickel beer night.  The American people want to lose weight by eating ice cream.  The American people love the Home Shopping Networkd because it's commercial-free.


--Will Durst (quoted in the Funny Times 4/16)
liveonearth: (cat_through_spectacle)

Does it mean, if you don’t understand something, and the community of physicists don’t understand it, that means God did it?... If that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.

--Neil DeGrasse Tyson

liveonearth: (curiosity and cat)
I am an agnotologist, no doubt.  That is to say, I am fascinated with all that we do not know, with the gray areas and uncertainties of life, death, and everything.  Agnostic = Doesn't Know.  Agnotology = Study of Ignorance.  Science depends on us being very clear about what we do not know yet, so that we can devise ways to try to find out.

Great article here from the NY Times )
liveonearth: (moon)
Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon
by Tom Myers and Michael Ghiglieri


This book logs all the mistakes you can make at the Grand Canyon.  There's an interview with the authors here.  There have been some changes since the first edition.  There are more environmental deaths, climbing deaths down in the canyon, and suicides than when the book was written. There are fewer deaths overall and fewer falls from the top of the canyon. Perhaps the park has improved safety and access to cliff tops to cause this change.

Q: What are common risk factors for death at the Canyon?

A: "Men, we have a problem," Ghiglieri said to an audience at NAU's Cline Library this winter, displaying a graphic with a skull and crossbones.

Being male, and young, is a tremendous risk factor, he and Myers found.

Of 55 who have accidentally fallen from the rim of the canyon, 39 were male. Eight of those guys were hopping from one rock to another or posing for pictures, including a 38-year-old father from Texas pretending to fall to scare his daughter, who then really did fall 400 feet to his death.

So is taking unknown shortcuts, which sometimes lead to cliffs.

Going solo is a risk factor in deaths from falls, climbing (anticipated or unplanned) and hiking.

Arrogance, impatience or ignorance also sometimes play a part.


SOURCE
http://azdailysun.com/news/local/canyon-deaths-and-counting/article_ba588a05-e816-55be-87f6-80f15b76f744.html
liveonearth: (House religion psychosis)
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.
-—Isaac Asimov
liveonearth: (Homer Simpson "D'oh!")
Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.
--Lily Tomlin
liveonearth: (moon)
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.

--Martin A. Schwartz
http://jcs.biologists.org/content/121/11/1771.full
liveonearth: (Donkey)
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
--Ambrose Bierce
liveonearth: (Default)
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than knowledge.
--Charles Darwin





Imagine being lost in the wilderness with a group of 10. Who is the most confident about which way you should go? Always an interesting test.)

(Didn't mean to but both knowledge and confidence tags just created. Not sure I will ever stop creating new tags, sorry. Follow a parallel tag to track the idea farther back. This journal is a form of mind map.)
liveonearth: (dragon)
The problem's not that the truth is harsh but that liberation from ignorance is as painful as being born. Run after truth until you're breathless. Accept the pain involved in re-creating yourself afresh. These ideas will take a life to comprehend, and hard one interspersed with drunken moments.
--Nagui Mahfouz in Palace of Desire
liveonearth: (circle)
The tourist is someone who doesn’t know where he’s been.
The traveller doesn’t know where he’s going.
--Paul Theroux
liveonearth: (Default)
This video is a composite of answers to this question by candidates for the Miss USA Crown. The vast majority don't believe in evolution, but most seem to think that both evolution and creationism should be taught in school. The California girl that got the crown is a science nerd! Yeay!! Miss Kentucky (~5:30ish) represents the south painfully well.

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