"Our job is not to make up anybody’s mind, but to open minds, and to make the agony of decision-making so intense you can escape only by thinking."
- Fred W. Friendly (1915-1998)

"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you mad."
- Aldous Huxley

"If you have ever injected truth into politics, then you have no politics."
- Will Rogers

Sunday, September 29, 2013

The Pursuit of Ignorance

"Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science."

- James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)



This is one of the best TED Talks I have send on the subject of science...what it actually is, and why we are teaching it all wrong (and perhaps why we have such an ignorant populace in the US in things scientific).  Scientific knowledge properly acquired should generate more questions...or else it is not science. 

Dogmatic institutions like politics and religions constantly "dead-end" themselves by declaring "truths" -- at least as they see them to their advantage at the moment.  True science follows the truth wherever it may lead, and is constantly pushing the frontier of inquiry forward while the dogmatic approach is constantly building or shoring up old stone walls around whatever they have chosen to be "truth".  

 

I particularly like his comment at the end about "bulimic education" --- this is one of the major flaws in our current education system that has to be rectified if we are ever going to join the "flat world" that we all live in. 
 
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