We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.
Book: Breakfast of Champions
Ideas rot if you don’t do something with them. I used to try to hoard them, but they rotted. Now I just blog them or tell people about them. Sometimes they still rot, but sometimes someone finds them useful in one way or another.
I think we have to go to the young people, right from the very beginning. The whole structure of how we learn about science has been warped and is getting more warped by the testing requirements that are put in place now because science is being taught as a set of facts instead of being portrayed as a process or a trajectory, and the trajectory is what really matters. Knowledge is plastic and is always evolving, and ideas mature and take on different shapes. The only way that you are going to distinguish between an immature idea and a mature idea is if you have a better understanding of how science works. So that is why I focused that book on young people. Kids are the only chunk of society left that is open to new ways of thinking. The more I learned over the years, the more rigid and entrenched people get the older they are, in terms of the way they feel the world works.
If you don’t wanna run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don’t have the time or resources to do ‘em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas that you’ll get to later.
Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themselves of how perfectly that idea should be executed. And they imagine it on a beautiful platter with glitter and rose petals. And everyone’s clapping for them. But the bummer is most ideas kinda suck when you do ‘em. And no matter how much you plan you still have to do something for the first time. And you’re almost guaranteed the first time you do something it’ll blow. But somebody who does something bad three times still has three times the experience of that other person who’s still dreaming of all the applause.
Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themselves of how perfectly that idea should be executed. And they imagine it on a beautiful platter with glitter and rose petals. And everyone’s clapping for them. But the bummer is most ideas kinda suck when you do ‘em. And no matter how much you plan you still have to do something for the first time. And you’re almost guaranteed the first time you do something it’ll blow. But somebody who does something bad three times still has three times the experience of that other person who’s still dreaming of all the applause.
Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.
The only reason I have ever thought that I would want a blog, is merely to criticize Intelligent Design. It is not a science. It is saying that anything not immediately obvious is the work of “Higher Powers.” It stops questions rather than promoting them, which is not science. It is honestly the same thing as the physics student that, rather than spend the time and finish a problem, simply skips to the answer and calls a “higher power” to fill in at an equals sign. Quick if we make enough eraser marks than no one will notice we didn’t prove anything.
Away message - November 6, 2005
Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
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naelyn /
belief, concept, fantasy, idea, ideas, legend, perfection, real, unreal
#1481
The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
Book: “Choke” by Chuck Palahniuk, pgs 160
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not the man to whom the idea first occurs.
The hardest part about gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. As long as that niche is occupied, evidence and proof and logical demonstration get nowhere. But once the niche is emptied of the wrong idea that has been filling it—once you can honestly say “I don’t know”—then it becomes possible to get at the truth.
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person’s brow.
At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes—an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.
The way in which ideas are formed is what gives character to the human mind. The mind which forms its ideas on realities is a solid mind; that which is satisfied with appearances is superficial; that which sees things as they are is a just mind; that which appreciates them badly is a false mind; that which invents imaginary relationships having neither reality nor appearance, is a foolish one; that which does not compare is an imbecile. The attitude, more or less great, of comparing ideas, and of finding a rapport and relationship is that which gives more or less character to the mind of man.