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“If my starting offer is “I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, but you don’t get to rob, beat, enslave, or kill me or my kind,” I can’t expect you to agree to the deal or third parties to ratify it, because there’s no good reason that I should get privileges just because I’m me and you’re not.32 Nor are we likely to agree to the deal “I get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill you and your kind, and you get to rob, beat, enslave, and kill me and my kind,” despite its symmetry, because the advantages either of us might get in harming the other are massively outweighed by the disadvantages we would suffer in being harmed (yet another implication of the Law of Entropy: harms are easier to inflict and have larger effects than benefits). We’d be wiser to negotiate a social contract that puts us in a positive-sum game: neither gets to harm the other, and both are encouraged to help the other.”
― Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
― Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
“(As Montesquieu wrote, “If triangles had a god they would give him three sides.”) For”
― Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
― Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
“To the Enlightenment thinkers the escape from ignorance and superstition showed how mistaken our conventional wisdom could be, and how the methods of science—skepticism, fallibilism, open debate, and empirical testing—are a paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge.”
― Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
― Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
“As we care about more of humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen.”
― Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
― Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
“People are by nature illiterate and innumerate, quantifying the world by “one, two, many” and by rough guesstimates.21 They understand physical things as having hidden essences that obey the laws of sympathetic magic or voodoo rather than physics and biology: objects can reach across time and space to affect things that resemble them or that had been in contact with them in the past (remember the beliefs of pre–Scientific Revolution Englishmen).22 They think that words and thoughts can impinge on the physical world in prayers and curses. They underestimate the prevalence of coincidence.23 They generalize from paltry samples, namely their own experience, and they reason by stereotype, projecting the typical traits of a group onto any individual that belongs to it. They infer causation from correlation. They think holistically, in black and white, and physically, treating abstract networks as concrete stuff. They are not so much intuitive scientists as intuitive lawyers and politicians, marshaling evidence that confirms their convictions while dismissing evidence that contradicts them.24 They overestimate their own knowledge, understanding, rectitude, competence, and luck.25”
― Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
― Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
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