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posted by janrinok on Friday June 08 2018, @10:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the smeared-electrons-and-live/dead-cats dept.

Review of a couple of recent publications, in The Boston Review

People are gullible. Humans can be duped by liars and conned by frauds; manipulated by rhetoric and beguiled by self-regard; browbeaten, cajoled, seduced, intimidated, flattered, wheedled, inveigled, and ensnared. In this respect, humans are unique in the animal kingdom.

Aristotle emphasizes another characteristic. Humans alone, he tells us, have logos: reason. Man, according to the Stoics, is zoön logikon, the reasoning animal. But on reflection, the first set of characteristics arises from the second. It is only because we reason and think and use language that we can be hoodwinked.

We'll get to the quantum mechanics in a bit.

The two books under consideration here bring the paradox home, each in its own way. Adam Becker's What Is Real? chronicles the tragic side of a crowning achievement of reason, quantum physics. The documentarian Errol Morris gives us The Ashtray, a semi-autobiographical tale of the supremely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn. Both are spellbinding intellectual adventures into the limits, fragility, and infirmity of human reason. Becker covers the sweep of history, from the 1925 birth of the "new" quantum physics up through the present day.

So, verifiable, experimental, experienced proof?

Not only can people be led astray, most people are. If the devout Christian is right, then committed Hindus and Jews and Buddhists and atheists are wrong. When so many groups disagree, the majority must be mistaken. And if the majority is misguided on just this one topic, then almost everyone must be mistaken on some issues of great importance. This is a hard lesson to learn, because it is paradoxical to accept one's own folly. You cannot at the same time believe something and recognize that you are a mug to believe it. If you sincerely judge that it is raining outside, you cannot at the same time be convinced that you are mistaken in your belief. A sucker may be born every minute, but somehow that sucker is never oneself.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 09 2018, @12:33AM (3 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday June 09 2018, @12:33AM (#690611)

    In this respect, humans are unique in the animal kingdom.

    Insofar as most humans know. The animal and plant kindgoms are full of guile, deceit, trickery, intimidation and unbalanced partnerships. That the author cannot understand how these "human" relationships such as:

    duped by liars and conned by frauds; manipulated by rhetoric and beguiled by self-regard; browbeaten, cajoled, seduced, intimidated, flattered, wheedled, inveigled, and ensnared.

    are similarly, and even more dramatically, demonstrated in non-human animal to animal relationships is more a testament to the author's simple ignorance than any lack of complexity in the behavior of other animals.

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  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday June 09 2018, @01:32AM (2 children)

    by aristarchus (2645) on Saturday June 09 2018, @01:32AM (#690620) Journal

    So, then, we are not going to get to the quantum physics, are we? And thus never to the underlying philosophical controversy. Read a bit further to find out what the author is claiming is the fraud.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 09 2018, @01:59AM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday June 09 2018, @01:59AM (#690631)

      the underlying philosophical controversy.

      You mean politics and showmanship vs logical proof and verifiable, measurable facts? That goes on in the non-human animal kingdom as well - though I must admit, within our limited understanding, we seem to have built it to a much higher level than anything we have been able to understand of non-human social interactions.

      It's 10pm, and I have 6 hours of things I want to do before I get to sleep at 11, so the rest of the story will wait for me - perhaps forever, but certainly at least until tomorrow.

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    • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @02:36AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @02:36AM (#690646)

      Ah, quantum physics is why homosexual men are evil. Or maybe homosexual men are the reason there aren't any women quantum physicists?

      Or maybe it was incels that made 53% of white women vote for Trump? Must be homosexual incels who have had 8-10 sexual partners who are destroying this country.

      I'll tell you, incels with upwards of 8 sexual partners are a menace. Especially at once. But I think they just call than an anime convention.