[b]Karl R. Popper
In my view, aiming at simplicity and lucidity is a moral duty of all intellectuals: lack of clarity is a sin, and pretentiousness is a crime.[/b]
Of course, as we all know, you can take that too far. Way too far for example.
As indicated by our example, methodological nominalism is nowadays fairly generally accepted in the natural sciences. The problems of the social sciences, on the other hand, are still for the most part treated by essentialist methods. This is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons for their backwardness.
This along with objectivism.
For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.
Back again [as always] to the part where one ends and the other begins. Where one begins and the other ends.
“It can’t happen here" is always wrong: a dictatorship can happen anywhere.
Now that might be hard to, say, trump. Here in particular.
It is often asserted that, in view of the situation in quantum theory, object and subject can no longer be sharply separated. 1 To use Heitler’s words, the ‘separation of the world into an “objective outside reality”, and “us”, the self-conscious onlookers, can no longer be maintained. Object and subject become inseparable from each other’. 2 This, according to Bohr, is due to ‘the impossibility of any sharp separation between the behaviour of atomic objects and the interaction with the measuring instruments which serve to define the conditions under which the phenomena appear’. 3 Heitler elaborates the point in some detail. ‘One may ask’, he writes, ‘if it is sufficient to carry out a measurement by a self-registering apparatus or whether the presence of an observer is required.’ And he arrives at the conclusion that the self-registering apparatus is insufficient, and that ‘the observer appears, as a necessary part of the whole structure, and in his full capacity as a conscious being’.
One possible interpretation: we’re fucked either way.
…a rational analysis of the consequences of a decision does not make the decision rational; the consequences do not determine our decision; it is always we who decide.
And you know where this leads. Either that or you don’t want to know.