10 MAY 2016 by ideonexus
You Need More than Passion to Change the World
You have to go through life with more than just passion for change; you need a strategy. I'll repeat that. I want you to have passion, but you have to have a strategy. Not just awareness, but action. Not just hashtags, but votes.
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But to bring about structural change, lasting change, awareness is not enough. It requires changes in law, changes in custom. If you care about mass incarceration, let me ask you: How are you pressuring members of Congress to pass the criminal justice ... 1 
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notes21 APR 2014 by ideonexus
"Cosmos" Converts
I’ve met secular humanists who grew up in evangelical households, for whom Cosmos was their first exposure to a scientific way of viewing the world. Dad was a difference maker. He reached out to people. He took them by the awe and wonder we feel over the most important questions we can think to imagine. He pulled them away from blind faith, away from pseudoscience, toward a deeper, richer understanding of the universe.
And he did it with compassion. He didn’t berate people or make them f... 1 notes
notesNick Sagan explains how his father's compassion and energy converted people to humanism.
02 JAN 2014 by ideonexus
Anyone Should be Allowed to Speak
Anyone should be allowed to speak out, whoever he may be, so long as he is not a hostile element and does not make malicious attacks, and it does not matter if he says something wrong. Leaders at all levels have the duty to listen to others. Two principles must be observed: (1) Say all you know and say it without reserve; (2) Don't blame the speaker but take his words as a warning. Unless the principle of "Don't blame the speaker" is observed genuinely and not falsely, the result will not be ... 1 notes
notesFreely and with passion without fear of retribution.
30 NOV 2013 by ideonexus
"Follow Your Passion" is Terrible Advice
So I started to wonder what would happen if we challenged some of these sacred cows. Follow your passion -- we've been talking about it here for the last 36 hours. Follow your passion -- what could possibly be wrong with that? Probably the worst advice I ever got. (Laughter) You know, follow your dreams and go broke, right? I mean, that's all I heard growing up. I didn't know what to do with my life, but I was told if you follow your passion, it's going to work out.
I can give you 30 example... 1 notes
notes"The road less traveled" is better advice.
07 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
Imagining the Primitive Mind
AND now let us indulge in a very interesting speculation; how did it feel to be a man in those early days of the human adventure? How did men think and what did they think in those remote days of hunting and wandering four hundred centuries ago before seed time and harvest began. Those were days long before the written record of any human impressions, and we are left almost entirely to inference and guesswork in our answers to these questions.
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Primitive man probably thought very much ... 1 notes
notesAs evolution tends to build in lairs, the primitive mind must have been much like that of a child.
24 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Scientific Truth Must Come Out of Controversy
Scientific truth, like puristic truth, must come about by controversy. Personally this view is abhorrent to me. It seems to mean that scientific truth must transcend the individual, that the best hope of science lies in its greatest minds being often brilliantly and determinedly wrong, but in opposition, with some third, eclectically minded, middle-of-the-road nonentity seizing the prize while the great fight for it, running off with it, and sticking it into a textbook for sophomores written ... 1 notes
notesThere is the ideal of scientific facts taught without passion and the reality of impassioned conflict within scientific exploration.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Science is Performed With the "Passion of Hope"
Here Coleridge was defending the intellectual discipline of science as a force for clarity and good. He then added one of his most inspired perceptions. He thought that science, as a human activity, ‘being necessarily performed with the passion of Hope, it was poetical’. Science, like poetry, was not merely ‘progressive’. It directed a particular kind of moral energy and imaginative longing into the future. It enshrined the implicit belief that mankind could achieve a better, happier ... 1 notes
notesIt is inspired by the idea that humanity can improve and create a better world.
See Also: Coleridge to Davy, 1 January 1800, Coleridge Collected Letters, edited by E.L. Griggs, vol 1; and see Treneer, p5816 DEC 2011 by ideonexus
The Temperament of the Mathematician
It may be observed of mathematicians that they only meddle with such things as are certain, passing by those that are doubtful and unknown. They profess not to know all things, neither do they affect to speak of all things. What they know to be true, and can make good by invincible arguments, that they publish and insert among their theorems. Of other things they are silent and pass no judgment at all, chusing [choosing] rather to acknowledge their ignorance, than affirm anything rashly. They...Folksonomies: mathematics
Folksonomies: mathematics
1 notes
notesAlways to acknowledge their ignorance and only indulge in those pursuits in which total certainty may be achieved.
18 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
How Science is Different from Any Other Human Enterprise
Science is different from many another human enterprise - not, of course, in its practitioners' being influenced by the culture they grew up in, nor in sometimes being right and sometimes wrong (which are common to every human activity), but in its passion for framing testable hypotheses, in its search for definitive experiments that confirm or deny ideas, in the vigour of its substantive debate, and in its willingness to abandon ideas that have been found wanting. If we were not aware of our...Folksonomies: science scientific method
Folksonomies: science scientific method
1 For its need to form testable hypotheses.
21 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Dan Ingalls Wonders how Genius Finds Time to Do Its Work
Often, reading about famous people, the side of it that I'm interested in is, how do they make their life work? All the things that weren't their passion, and how did they deal with that and with their family, and with their finances, and balancing that Or did they just hole up and say, "To hell with everything else," and let it just come crumbling down until they had their work done? 1 notes
notesHow does genius deal with all the distraction of life, or does it simply ignore the outside world and let it come crashing down.
