I proved, to my astonishment, to be as American as any Texas G.I.

From “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American” by James Baldwin.

In my necessity to find the terms on which my experience could be related to that of others, Negroes and whites, writers and non-writers, I proved, to my astonishment, to be as American as any Texas G.I. And I found my experience was shared by every American writer I knew in Paris. Like me, they had been divorced from their origins and it turned out to make very little difference that the origins of white Americans were European and mine were African — they were no more at home in Europe than I was.

The fact that I was the son of a slave and they were the sons of free men meant less, by the time we confronted each other on European soil, than the fact we were both searching for our separate identities. When we had found these, we seemed to be saying, why, then, we would no longer need to cling to the shame and bitterness which had divided us so long.

It became terribly clear in Europe, as it never had been here, that we knew more about each other than any European ever could. And it also became clear that, no matter where our fathers had been born, or what they had endured, the fact of Europe had formed us both was part of our identity and part of our inheritance.

Sustained progress through alternating guesswork and criticism requires a tradition of criticism

From Why Science is the Source of All Progress by David Deutsch.

For thousands of generations, we were in the dark. Our ancestors gazed at the night sky wondering what stars are- which was exactly the right thing to wonder about- using eyes and brains anatomically indistinguishable from ours. In every other field too, they tried to observe the world and to understand it. Occasionally they recognised simple patterns in nature, but when they tried to discover the underlying features of reality they failed almost completely. At the time of the Enlightenment they mistakenly believed that we “derive” knowledge of these features from the “evidence of our senses”, or “read” it from the “Book of Nature” by making observations, the doctrine called empiricism.

But science needs more than empiricism. Consider an audience watching a conjuring trick. The problem is not to predict that the trick will appear: I can predict that whenever a conjurer shows me an empty hat, something will later emerge from it. The problem is how the trick works, and that requires an explanation–a description of the unseen reality that accounts for the appearance.

For a new explanation one in turn needs creativity. To interpret dots in the sky as white-hot, million-kilometre spheres, one must first have conjured up the idea. That happens through guesswork - but guesswork usually produces errors, which is why observation is indeed essential to science, though not in the way supposed by empiricism. Its main use is to choose between theories that have already been guessed by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas.

Sustained progress through alternating guesswork and criticism requires a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition. Usually, the whole point of traditions was to maintain the status quo and to defer to authority.

In turn, the scientific tradition of criticism soon led to the rule that theories must make testable predictions. This alone cannot be the secret of the success of science, however, because testable predictions have always been common too. Every prophet who claims that the sun will go out next Tuesday has a testable theory. Science must consist of testable explanations.

Though they helped to spur the Enlightenment, testable explanations are also not in themselves sufficient, since they existed long before science.

[snip]

Solutions always reveal new problems. So one must also always seek a better hard-to-vary explanation. That, at its heart, is the scientific method. As Richard Feynman remarked: “Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.” Because it is prior to experimental testing, the practice of requiring good explanations can drive objective progress even in non-scientific fields. This is exactly what happened in the Enlightenment. Although the pioneers of that era did not put it that way, it was, and remains, the spirit of the age. It is the source of all progress.

The widest, most expansive truth

From The Whole Truth by Julian Baggini. While I might agree on an operational level, this a very slippery slope and subject to grave abuse.

The idea that one should always say what one truly believes is narcissistic nonsense, he argued. The role of the intellectual is to say what they think needs saying most at any given time in a debate, not to bear testimony to their deepest convictions. Although this might involve some dissembling, it serves the cause of establishing truth in the long run better than simply saying the truth as you see it. What matters is how what one says helps build and expand the widest, most expansive truth—not whether as a distinct ingredient it is more or less true than another.

A product built in order to reach a long-term vision, but one that met an immediate need

In Hitting The Sweet Spot: The True Genius Of Steve Jobs thoughts on Steve Jobs.

There are, fundamentally, two subspecies of entrepreneur. One starts from the present, and visualizes the next logical step from where things are now. This type figures out how to make something better, cheaper, or more widely available, and manages to clear the financial, regulatory, and market barriers to getting it into the marketplace. The other visualizes a different world, one in which things are different and better from the way they are now, and then figures out what path of evolution brings us to that world, and, as the last step, what is the least ambitious step possible that will move things toward that goal.

[snip]

It was precisely from this visionary environment that Jobs and Wozniak managed, for the first but not the last time, to hit the entrepreneurial sweet spot: a product built in order to reach a long-term vision, but one that met an immediate need, and was neither so timid that it did not stand out from its peers, nor so advanced it would cost too much or be too far ahead of user demand.

[snip]

Yet from mistakes and failure, his ability to learn and correct course, and his sheer persistence again and again pulled success out of failure. And that persistence came at heart from his vision.

A pyromaniac in a field of straw men

Elizabeth Warren and liberalism, twisting the ‘social contract’ by George F. Will. Three lines:

Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.

Many members of the liberal intelligentsia, that herd of independent minds

Government humility in the face of society’s creative complexity.

His vision of the Socialist future is a vision of present society with the worst abuses left out

George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, Chapter 11.

For it must be remembered that a working man, so long as he remains a genuine working man, is seldom or never a Socialist in the complete, logically consistent sense. Very likely he votes Labour, or even Communist if he gets the chance, but his conception of Socialism is quite different from that of the, book-trained Socialist higher up. To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter' hours and nobody bossing you about. To the more revolutionary type, the type who is a hunger-marcher and is blacklisted by employers, the word is a sort of rallying-cry against the forces of oppression, a vague threat of future violence. But, so far as my experience goes, no genuine working man grasps the deeper implications of Socialism. Often, in my opinion, he is a truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he does remember, what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means justice and common decency. But what he does not grasp is that Socialism cannot be narrowed down to mere economic justice' and that a reform of that magnitude is bound to work immense changes in our civilization and his own way of life. His vision of the Socialist future is a vision of present society with the worst abuses left out, and with interest centring round the same things as at present-- family life, the pub, football, and local politics. As for the philosophic side of Marxism, the pea-and-thimble trick with those three mysterious entities, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, I have never met a working man who had the faintest interest in it.

There is no darkness that can't grow darker still

From Things could actually get a lot worse in The Economist

When systematic policy error results in low demand, it's as likely that the error will be sustained or compounded as it is to be rectified. In such cases, every bottom is ephemeral, and there is no darkness that can't grow darker still.

The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything

From The Truth Wears Off by Jonah Lehrer.

This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that. Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests. Verbal overshadowing might exhibit the decline effect, but it remains extensively relied upon within the field. The same holds for any number of phenomena, from the disappearing benefits of second-generation antipsychotics to the weak coupling ratio exhibited by decaying neutrons, which appears to have fallen by more than ten standard deviations between 1969 and 2001. Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.) Despite these findings, second-generation antipsychotics are still widely prescribed, and our model of the neutron hasn’t changed. The law of gravity remains the same.

Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

My job as a mother is not to rely on the village but to protect my children from it

From Are You There God? It's Me, Monica by Caitlin Flanagan.

As a parent, I am horrified by the changes that have taken place in the common culture over the past thirty years. I believe that we are raising children in a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape in which no forces beyond individual households—individual mothers and fathers—are protecting children from pornography and violent entertainment. The "it takes a village" philosophy is a joke, because the village is now so polluted and so desolate of commonly held, child-appropriate moral values that my job as a mother is not to rely on the village but to protect my children from it.

Differences between individuals in self-control are present in early childhood

From A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety by Terrie E. Moffitta, Louise Arseneaultb, et al.

Differences between individuals in self-control are present in early childhood and can predict multiple indicators of health, wealth, and crime across 3 decades of life in both genders. Furthermore, it was possible to disentangle the effects of children’s self-control from effects of variation in the children’s intelligence, social class, and home lives of their families, thereby singling out self-control as a clear target for intervention policy. Joining earlier longitudinal follow-ups (7, 9, 28), our findings imply that innovative policies that put self-control center stage might reduce a panoply of costs that now heavily burden citizens and governments.

Differences between children in self-control predicted their adult outcomes approximately as well as low intelligence and low social class origins, which are known to be extremely difficult to improve through intervention.