Everything I know is learned. It’s an important thing to remember – it’s easy to forget and believe that everything you know is true in some fundamental and foundational way. Everything you know is learned too. Let’s unpack that. What do you know to be true? I know that I am writing this at the moment. Well, I think I am. Some dreams are pretty vivid, and hallucinations can be so vivid that people genuinely don’t know what’s going on….
I am reading The Selfish Gene at the moment. It’s a very good book, and beautifully written, as you would expect from Dawkins. This pair of sentences, though, stood out for their disappointing relevance to anti-vaccination, anti-mask, and otherwise anti-scientific individuals’ behavior. In the next paragraph, “ESS” means “evolutionary stable strategy”. In (too simple a summary), ESS means the strategy that evolution ‘settles upon’ which is most effective at reproducing the genes that regulate that strategy. “It is possible for…
I don’t know much. Nor do you. Every minute more knowledge is gained by humanity than any one person could learn in that minute. And the rate at which knowledge is being gained is accelerating. It has been argued that the last person who knew all that Western science knows died in 1829 (Source). By 1950, human knowledge was doubling every 25 years, and by 2000 human knowledge was doubling every year. By 2018, it was believed that human knowledge…
The New Hampshire Human Trafficking Task Force, along with a lot of other prominent organizations, have co-written and co-signed an important letter in the struggle, at this election cycle, for truth. Read the letter here