https://iai.tv/articles/vices-of-the-mind-auid-1220
Starts with Plato. Continues on down to Voltaire, Marx, and more recent pin-heads.
What I've heard of Isaac Newton, then he was an arrogant blowhard, that even bullied Leibniz, but his contributions to our physical understanding of reality is immeasurable.
You can be arrogant, you just have to have more to show for it, because less is demanded from the humble and downtrodden.
EDIT: As for epistemic vice, that can be shown as a resistance to knowledge and being close-minded.
Quote from: Sal1981 on March 20, 2019, 11:48:15 PM
What I've heard of Isaac Newton, then he was an arrogant blowhard, that even bullied Leibniz, but his contributions to our physical understanding of reality is immeasurable.
You can be arrogant, you just have to have more to show for it, because less is demanded from the humble and downtrodden.
EDIT: As for epistemic vice, that can be shown as a resistance to knowledge and being close-minded.
Newton was a Nerd, not an intellectual. Intellectuals are by definition, blowhards and ineffectual. When Newton was Master of the Mint, torturing counterfeiters, he wasn't ineffectual!
Quote from: Baruch on March 21, 2019, 07:28:46 AM
Newton was a Nerd, not an intellectual. Intellectuals are by definition, blowhards and ineffectual. When Newton was Master of the Mint, torturing counterfeiters, he wasn't ineffectual!
One can be both at the same time. I disagree with with your definition of "intellectual".
Quote from: Cavebear on April 18, 2019, 09:22:56 AM
One can be both at the same time. I disagree with with your definition of "intellectual".
That is very intellectual of you ;-)
Quote from: Baruch on April 18, 2019, 10:59:28 AM
That is very intellectual of you ;-)
Well of course it is. I'm smarter than the average bear. But the real difference is that I sit on my cavebear ass sometimes and just "think". Without paying attention to what pundits say on TV or radio. I fear too many of us have lost that habit.
Quote from: Baruch on March 21, 2019, 07:28:46 AM
Newton was a Nerd, not an intellectual. Intellectuals are by definition, blowhards and ineffectual. When Newton was Master of the Mint, torturing counterfeiters, he wasn't ineffectual!
I recently read
Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton: A Novel (https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Matter-Private-Isaac-Newton/dp/1400049490), by Philip Kerr, that was about Newton at the Mint:
QuoteIn 1696, Christopher Ellis, a young, hot-tempered gentleman, is sent to the Tower of London, but not as a prisoner. A sudden twist of fate has led him there to assist the renowned scientist Sir Isaac Newton, who as Warden of the Royal Mint has accepted an appointment to hunt down counterfeiters who threaten to topple the shaky, war-weakened economy. Armed with Newton’s superior intellect and Ellis’s skill with a sword, the new partners seem primed to solve the case. But when their investigation leads them to a mysterious coded message on a corpse hidden in the Lion Tower, they realize that something more sinister is afoot. In the heat of their pursuit, Newton and Ellis’s suspicions become all too real as the body count rises and the duo uncovers a menacing far-reaching plot that might lead to the collapse of the governmentâ€"and cost them their very lives. An extraordinary, suspense-filled, and richly satisfying tale, Dark Matter is an engrossing mystery infused with the volatile mix of politics, science, and religion that characterized life in seventeenth-century London.
It really managed to humanize the great man, he wasn't at all arrogant or conceited. Not even as much so as Sherlock Holmes, whom he is kind of like in this book.
Quote from: Unbeliever on April 18, 2019, 02:08:41 PM
I recently read Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton: A Novel (https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Matter-Private-Isaac-Newton/dp/1400049490), by Philip Kerr, that was about Newton at the Mint:
It really managed to humanize the great man, he wasn't at all arrogant or conceited. Not even as much so as Sherlock Holmes, whom he is kind of like in this book.
I knew some of that, but not all. Thank you for putting a practical face on a great scientist. Intellect is not limited to only one subject.
Its a novel. Not a bio. This is a good bio ...
Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton
A brilliant yet gay man, with a terrifying temper. And an alchemist and a Revelations nut. Very multidimensional.
According to the novel he was an Arianist - he didn't believe that Jesus was God. He kept that a secret from his contemporaries, though, for obvious reasons. Does anyone know if that's true of him?
Quote from: Unbeliever on April 19, 2019, 01:15:50 PM
According to the novel he was an Arianist - he didn't believe that Jesus was God. He kept that a secret from his contemporaries, though, for obvious reasons. Does anyone know if that's true of him?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Isaac_Newton
Since he believed in Revelations, trying to untangle that, he was clearly a theist. Scholarly opinion finds him non-Anglican and Arian (early unitarian). Why would that interest an atheist? Newton wasn't a true deist, since he invoked G-d to avoid solar system chaos (and it turns out, we now know for over 100 years, that it is a chaotic system). Newton couldn't have known that, since that was found out 200 years after his own time. His interest in interpreting Daniel and Revelations shows he was a millennialist. His alchemical work showed that he was open to various kinds of mysticism.
Over the course of the 18th century New England Puritanism mutated into Unitarianism BTW. So he was "early".
It is easy for human scientists to be wrong. Galileo invected against the idea that the Moon causes tides ... something subsequently proven by Newton. Even Newton found the idea of "action at a distance", something Descartes rejected, to be absurd but he felt he had to draw that conclusion anyway. And of course it was well beyond his time that space-time could be seen as inseparable, or that the this materially empty plenum could be curved (non-rectilinear). But note, GR has never been extended properly to quantum theory, on SR has been. Reconciling GR with QFT remains an open question, or even if it is reasonable to do so.
Quote from: Baruch on April 18, 2019, 02:52:59 PM
Its a novel. Not a bio. This is a good bio ...
Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton
A brilliant yet gay man, with a terrifying temper. And an alchemist and a Revelations nut. Very multidimensional.
Brilliant people are often totally nuts otherwise. It might be a version of ADHD. Obsessive focus can be wonderful or ruinous...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFL5NoM9GVE
Why do monkeys think they know monkey shines? The college educated intellectuals are the worst monkeys around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPE7ZCGjw4o
The penguins were the smarter ones.
Quote from: Unbeliever on May 29, 2019, 06:34:50 PM
No content but the video. But "why do stupid people think they are intelligent"? Because they think they are intelligent.
In one office, I had the misfortune to be "acting" when a routine report about average office space per employee crossed my desk. Being a curious type, I checked the math. It was wrong. I called the analyst in to ask about it. It turned out that she didn't really understand how to use a computer spreadsheet. She just treated it as a form to fill out. She did all her work of a calculator and typed the numbers in.
She was averaging unequal numbers. Let's just say one Region had 100 employees and another had 1,000. She treated their average sq ft the same. Because she didn't understand how to use the computer to sum columns. The averages were way false and had been all the years she "managed" the program.
I tried to explain how to check her numbers and use the computer functions. She considered that we were "debating" the right way to measure them. I had to explain that I was "correcting" her errors, not debating how they should be done. When the Boss got back, all Hell broke loose. The correct numbers were bad for the office. But everyone agreed that I was right, without any doubt.
And she kept her job, doing things wrong. And she still thought she was right because her method was "easier".
That's what DAMNED STUPID is.
The innumerate (my ex for example). Some people don't get numbers. Sometimes they are covering for a disability. We had a sergeant who got thru 20 years of service, hiding severe dyslexia ... to avoid getting discharged. And she wasn't a very nice person to talk to either. Same first name as my ex.
Talk sense to a fool and they call you foolish- said someone famous...a long time ago...or not so long ago.
Quote from: aitm on June 06, 2019, 08:54:21 AM
Talk sense to a fool and they call you foolish- said someone famous...a long time ago...or not so long ago.
Isn't there something about not arguing with fools because people might not notice the difference? Well, in my case, I had to correct the error. And of course, it WAS corrected. Even the managers who could barely divide 100 by 10 understood. I helped craft the correction to the next report, It got weasel-worded of course. The good part was that no one really cared. The bad part was also that no one really cared.
Quote from: Cavebear on June 06, 2019, 09:32:42 AM
Isn't there something about not arguing with fools because people might not notice the difference? Well, in my case, I had to correct the error. And of course, it WAS corrected. Even the managers who could barely divide 100 by 10 understood. I helped craft the correction to the next report, It got weasel-worded of course. The good part was that no one really cared. The bad part was also that no one really cared.
Military guys are a bit more rooted in pragmatism. Other government departments are ... hard to pin down. I can see there would be departments where you couldn't tell up from down (because it is all a matter of arbitrary policy).
Quote from: Baruch on June 06, 2019, 12:03:27 PM
Military guys are a bit more rooted in pragmatism. Other government departments are ... hard to pin down. I can see there would be departments where you couldn't tell up from down (because it is all a matter of arbitrary policy).
My Dad was the top civilian in a department at an army base co-equal with a rotating senior Colonel (forget the exact term for the rank, but he was the one who could tell the other Colonels to get the coffee for the Generals). He said the politics there were as bad as anything he ever saw in civilian agencies. In fact, he was offerred a supergrade at the Pentagon and turned it down. As in "no way in hell, buddy"! LOL!