On rationality...............

 

Rationality is thus an a priori assumption rather than a description of the world.

-Charles Kindleberger

Wisdom......................

 

Go find some more options and question some assumptions.

too.....................

 

In any case, I've never wanted to be part of any group of believers.  The globe is too wide, too various, to assume one knows it all.

-Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning from Silence

Much more difficult..........................

 

...........................................though.

Challenges......................

 James Franklin did not behave as most colonial printers did.  When he decided to start his own paper, he was definitely not publishing it by authority.  In fact, the New England Courant began by attacking the Boston establishment, in particular the program of inoculating people for smallpox that was being promoted by the Puritan ministers Cotton Mather and his father.  When the inoculation debate died down, the paper turned to satirizing other subjects of Boston interest, including pretended learning and religious hypocrisy, some of which provoked the Mathers into replies.  Eager to try his own hand at satire, young Benjamin in 1722 submitted some essays to his brother's newspaper under the name of Silence Dogood,  a play on Cotton Mather's Essays to Do Good, the name usually given to the minister's Bonifacius, published in 1710.  For a sixteen-year-old boy to assume the persona of a middle-aged woman was a daunting challenge, and young Franklin took "exquisite Pleasure" in fooling his brother and others into thinking that only "Men of some Character among us for Learning and Ingenuity" could have written the newspaper pieces.

-Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

More wisdom....................

 Assumptions are clouds with teeth.

-more here

challenge..................

 A society that is inherently not curious about the outside world and unwilling to challenge its own assumptions is one that does not innovate.  A society that does not innovate cannot advance or prosper.

- William J. Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty:  How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created

This is asking a lot...............

These articles about the election must be cranked out, and I'm only blogging this one because it is so absurd. Kamala Harris was "briefly sent... into the stratosphere"?! She briefly polled in the teens, and then slipped back into the single digits. Instead of an article asking why she's not more popular, ask yourselves how you ever got caught up into assuming that she was supposed to be so popular. You assume something should be true, then you proceed to inquire why it isn't. How about speaking honestly about your own assumption?

-from this Althouse post

Making some rather large assumptions....

If, for example, good meant intelligent, and virtue meant wisdom; if men could be taught to see clearly their real interests, to see afar, the distant results of their deeds, to criticize and coordinate their desires out of a self-cancelling chaos into a purposive and creative harmony—this, perhaps, would provide for the educated and sophisticated man the morality which in the unlettered relies on reiterated precepts and external controls.  Perhaps all sin is error, partial vision, foolishness?  The intelligent man may have the same violent and unsocial impulses as the ignorant man, but surely he will control them better, and slip less often into imitation of the beast.  And in an intelligently administered society—one that returned to the individual, in widened powers, more than it took from him in restricted liberty—the advantage of every man would lie in social and loyal conduct, and only clear sight would be needed to ensure peace and order and good will.

-Will Durant,  The Story of Philosophy

It has always been a mystery to me......

"Maybe the biggest risk for most people is assuming they know exactly what happens next."

-Ben Carlson, as culled from here

On questioning the assumption..........

via

Challenges..............................

     Historians of science have often noted that at any give time scholars in a particular field tend to share basic assumptions about there subject.  Social scientists are no exception:  they rely on a view of human nature that provides the background of most discussions of specific behaviors but is rarely questioned.  Social scientists in the 1970s accepted two ideas about human nature.  First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound.  Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality.  Our article challenged both assumptions without discussing them directly.  We document systematic errors in the thinking of normal people, and we traced those errors to the design of the machinery of cognition rather than to the corruption of thought by emotion.

-Daniel Kahneman, from his introduction to Thinking, Fast and Slowly.  The article he refers to was one of his first joint papers with Amos Tversky

On temperament.................

One of the finance industry’s biggest failings is many blindly assume absolute brilliance is all they need when it’s really a relative game. There are plenty of smart people who are terrible investors because they can’t admit their own limitations. Intelligence is never in short supply on Wall Street, but the correct temperament is.

-Ben Carlson, as culled from here

About windows.....................................

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world.  Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”


-Isaac Asimov, as culled from here

Columbus makes a few mistakes....

     The diameter of the spherical Earth had been calculated accurately by the Greek Eratosthenes in the second century BC, and his calculation was still widely known in the time of Columbus.  Though no European foresaw what lay in wait for Columbus, since all thought mistakenly that the  Ocean Sea, empty of land, was much larger than it was, almost all who could read and had looked into the subject understood that Columbus was seriously underestimating the overall size of the Earth.*
     Columbus, basing his calculations on inaccurate assumptions, theorized that the east coast of Asia could be reached by a European ship within a few weeks of its leaving port.  The actual circumference of the Earth is about 40,000 kilometers, whereas Columbus assumed it to be closer to 25,000 kilometers.  Compounding his mistake was his misreading - in a Latin translation - of a renowned ninth-century Persian astronomer, Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Faghani, known in the West as Alfraganus.  The Persian's correct measurements were given in Arabic miles, which Columbus assumed to be the same as Roman miles.  In actuality, Roman miles are about 25 percent shorter than Arabic ones.  Had the Ocean not held the Americas and the vast sea been empty of land between Europe and Asia, Columbus and his crew, heading west, would have perished in the deep and never been heard from again.  This had indeed been the fate of several earlier (and well-known) attempts.

-Thomas Cahill,  Heretics and Heroes

*No one who knew anything thought the Earth was flat.  This was an anti-Catholic fable created by a nineteenth-century Frenchman named Jean Antoine Letronne and disseminated widely to English speakers by Washington Irving in his unreliable biography of Columbus.

But I like salt......................................

     Inventor Thomas Edison had a simple test he used to measure the "unexpectedness quotient" of prospective employees.  He would invite a candidate to lunch and serve a bowl of soup.  He would then watch to see whether to person salted his soup before tasting it.  If he did, he wouldn't be offered the job.  Edison felt that people are more open to different possibilities if they don't salt their experience before tasting it.
-Roger Von Oech, as excerpted from Expect The Unexpected (Or You Won't Find It):  A Creativity Tool Based On The Ancient Wisdom of Heraclitus

Assumptions..............................

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us."
-Wendell Berry

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