3
" There’s a technique we use in our local rationalist cluster called “Is That
Your True Rejection?”, and it works like this: Before you stake your
argument on a point, ask yourself in advance what you would say if that
point were decisively refuted. Would you relinquish your previous
conclusion? Would you actually change your mind? If not, maybe that point
isn’t really the key issue. You should search instead for a sufficiently
important point, or collection of points, such that you would change your
mind about the conclusion if you changed your mind about the arguments.
It is, in our patois, “logically rude,” to ask someone else to painstakingly
refute points you don’t really care about yourself. "
― Michael Shermer , Brain, Belief, and Politics (Cato Unbound Book 92011)
4
" In every known culture,
humans experience joy, sadness, disgust, anger, fear, and surprise. In every
known culture, these emotions are indicated by the same facial expressions.
This empirical observation, which is predicted and mandated by the
structural logic of evolution, is known as the psychic unity of mankind. (I
prefer the term “psychological unity of humankind,” but I didn’t invent it.) "
― Michael Shermer , Brain, Belief, and Politics (Cato Unbound Book 92011)
6
" The Soviets were not 50% right, they were entirely wrong. They weren’t
quantitatively wrong about the amount of variance due to the environment,
they were qualitatively wrong about what environmental manipulations
could do in the face of built-in universal human machinery. Having said this,
though, I now feel no particular impulse to vote Republican.
Also, it’s quite possible that someday you could create perfectly unselfish
people… if you used sufficiently advanced neurosurgery, drugs, and/or
brain-computer interfaces to engineer their brains into a new state that no
current human brain occupies. Whether or not this is in fact possible isn’t
something that ideology gets to decide. The reasoning errors of past
communists can’t prohibit any particular future technological advance from
being possible or practical. Having said that, I feel no particular impulse to
turn “liberal. "
― Michael Shermer , Brain, Belief, and Politics (Cato Unbound Book 92011)
12
" 1. The clear and quantitative physical differences among people in size,
strength, speed, agility, coordination, and other physical attributes that
translates into some being more successful than others, and that at least
half of these differences are inherited.
2. The clear and quantitative intellectual differences among people in
memory, problem solving ability, cognitive speed, mathematical talent,
spatial reasoning, verbal skills, emotional intelligence, and other mental
attributes that translates into some being more successful than others,
and that at least half of these differences are inherited. "
― Michael Shermer , Brain, Belief, and Politics (Cato Unbound Book 92011)