Sublime

Go out of your way and try to disprove your own favored belief. If you succeed, then you know that you can discard the belief. If you fail, then you can be more confident that your belief is the right one. If the exercise proves inconclusive, and it often will, you can wait for more evidence, knowing that you’ve done your duty for now.

Great thinkers don’t harbor doubts because they’re impostors. They maintain doubts because they know we’re all partially blind and they’re committed to improving their sight.

The trouble is that most people want to be right. The very best people, however, want to know if they’re right.

Il militait cependant pour que les dernières découvertes de psychologie expérimentale connaissent la plus large diffusion. « Pour l’amour de l’humanité, qu’aimeriez-vous voir arriver aujourd’hui ? » lui demandait la journaliste Elizabeth Hall dans une émission de radio de 1975 sur le thème de « la psychologie aujourd’hui ». Sa réponse est éloquente

This is also why undogmatic secular movements tend to make relatively modest promises. Aware of their imperfections, they hope to effect small incremental changes, raising the minimum wage by a few dollars or reducing child mortality by a few percentage points. It is the mark of dogmatic ideologies that due to their excessive self-confidence they r