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markfrankel18

The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • The ascent of man was secured through scientific creativity. But unlike many of his more glossy and glib contemporary epigones, Dr. Bronowski was never reductive in his commitment to science. Scientific activity was always linked to artistic creation. For Bronowski, science and art were two neighboring mighty rivers that flowed from a common source: the human imagination. Newton and Shakespeare, Darwin and Coleridge, Einstein and Braque: all were interdependent facets of the human mind and constituted what was best and most noble about the human adventure.
  • For Dr. Bronowski, the moral consequence of knowledge is that we must never judge others on the basis of some absolute, God-like conception of certainty.
  • At this point, in the final minutes of the show, the scene suddenly shifts to Auschwitz, where many members of Bronowski’s family were murdered. Then this happened. Please stay with it. This short video from the show lasts only four minutes or so.[Video: Dr. Jacob Bronowski's argument against certainty, made at Auschwitz for his show "The Ascent of Man." Watch on YouTube.]It is, I am sure you agree, an extraordinary and moving moment. Bronowski dips his hand into the muddy water of a pond which contained the remains of his family members and the members of countless other families. All victims of the same hatred: the hatred of the other human being. By contrast, he says — just before the camera hauntingly cuts to slow motion — “We have to touch people.”
markfrankel18

The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld (Part 1) - NYTimes.com - 2 views

  • When I first met Donald Rumsfeld in his offices in Washington, D.C., one of the things I said to him was that if we could provide an answer to the American public about why we went to war in Iraq, we would be rendering an important service. He agreed. Unfortunately, after having spent 33 hours over the course of a year interviewing Mr. Rumsfeld, I fear I know less about the origins of the Iraq war than when I started. A question presents itself: How could that be? How could I know less rather than more? Was he hiding something? Or was there really little more than met the eye?
  • Few people today remember that Rumsfeld was ostensibly responding to Miklaszewski’s request for evidence. What evidence do you have that Iraq is supplying terrorists with W.M.D.? Rumsfeld’s answer was a non-answer — not just an evasion or a misdirection. Many people believe Rumsfeld’s reply was brilliant. I think otherwise.
  • These 17th century debates remind us that if you have an unshakable belief in something, then no amount of evidence (or lack of evidence) can convince you otherwise. (There are always anti-rationalist objections to everything and anything. It is curious, however, to hear them in the 21st century rather than in the 17th.)
markfrankel18

The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld (Part 4) - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • What do I take from this? To me, progress hinges on our ability to discriminate knowledge from belief, fact from fantasy, on the basis of evidence. It’s not the known unknown from the known known, or the unknown unknown from the known unknown, that is crucial to progress. It’s what evidence do you have for X, Y or Z? What is the justification for your beliefs? When confronted with such a question, Rumsfeld was never, ever able to come up with an answer.
  • The history of the Iraq war is replete with false assumptions, misinterpreted evidence, errors in judgment. Mistakes can be made. We all make them. But Rumsfeld created a climate where mistakes could be made with little or no way to correct them. Basic questions about evidence for W.M.D. were replaced with equivocations and obfuscations. A hall of mirrors. An infinite regress to nowhere. What do I know I know? What do I know I know I know? What do I know I don’t know I don’t know? Ad infinitum. Absence of evidence could be evidence of absence or evidence of presence. Take your pick. An obscurantist’s dream. There’s a quotation I have never liked. It comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Not really. The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and know they are opposed.
  • Rumsfeld, too, may believe what he is saying. But believing something does not make it true. The question is why he believed what he believed. On the basis of what evidence? Mere belief is not enough.
markfrankel18

Are Scientists on "Cusp of Knowing" How Weird We Are? | Cross-Check, Scientific America... - 1 views

  • “The Copernicus Complex addresses some of the deepest questions humans have ever asked. How weird are we? Was our existence highly probable, or improbable? Even miraculous? You can break this question down into more specific questions: How probable was our universe? Our galaxy? Solar system? Planet? How probable was life? And how probable were creatures like us, who can ponder their probability?
  • Scientists still don’t have a clue why our universe has the form we observe, or how life began on the Earth some 3.6 billion years ago, or whether life exists elsewhere. During his talk at Stevens, Scharf acknowledged that we may never observe exoplanets in sufficient detail to know, with certainty, that they harbor life.
  • “Unfortunately, you cannot determine the probability of the universe or of life on Earth when you have only one universe and one history of life to contemplate. Statistics require more than one data point.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • We may be on the cusp of knowing, and yet still infinitely far away.
Lawrence Hrubes

What If We Had Perfect Robot Referees? - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • The air of machine precision casts doubt on what our eyes—or the eyes of referees—can process. As viewers, they argue, our instinct is to assume that all forms of assistance are equally effective, or that they do what they claim in the first place. But what we see on television is usually just a representation, or a calculated guess, based on thermal imaging, sound, or the work of cameras tracking an object’s velocity through air.
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