Sublime

An inspiration engine for ideas

AllPeopleCollectionsArticlesAudioBooksFilesHighlightsImagesLinksNotesTextTweetsVideos

"Today’s “best practices” lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried."

Peter Thiel • Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress (Edge Question)

A scientific theory is never proven right. It’s simply not proven wrong. Only when scientists work hard—but fail—to beat the crap out of their own ideas can they begin to develop confidence in those ideas. Even after a theory gains acceptance, new facts often emerge, requiring the refinement or complete abandonment of the status quo.

Ozan Varol • Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

"Seeking New Laws"

JamesClear.com jamesclear.com

There are two failure modes here. The first is to simply accept the internal theory of a practice unquestioned.

Albert Wenger • A Short Note on Persistent Practices

To try to study “women” or “men” under Theory is to miss the point. For the applied postmodernists, the topic of interest is “gender”—which they define as the behaviors and expectations that people considered men and women are taught to perform, which—though they cannot be entirely done away with—can be disrupted, confused, and complicated.

Helen Pluckrose • Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

Few understand the degree of rule-breaking required, because new ideas seem much more conservative once they succeed. They seem perfectly reasonable once you're using the new model of the world they brought with them. But they didn't at the time

How to Do Great Work

Yet it is widely believed, especially in the court of public opinion, that a true theory can have no failures and a false theory no successes.

Eliezer Yudkowsky • Rationality

Now you see, of course, that with this method, we can disprove any definite theory. If you have a definite theory and a real guess, from which you can really compute consequences, which could be compared to experiment, then in principle, we can get rid of any theory. We can always prove any definite theory wrong. Notice, however, we never prove it ... See more