Sublime

Evolutionary hypotheses, where one parameter is slightly optimized, have a less profound effect than revolutionary hypotheses, where the approach is fundamentally different. That said, evolutionary hypotheses are more likely to bear fruit.

Enfin il a trouvé dans la philosophie libérale le système de valeurs qui pouvait structurer un modèle d’action. Pour lui, la philosophie libérale, en respectant le pluralisme des idées et en privilégiant l’empirisme dans l’analyse et l’action, représente le système le moins mauvais pour orienter la politique.

In a well-designed test, outcomes can’t be predetermined. You must be willing to fail. The test must run forward to shed light on uncertainty, rather than run backward to confirm preconceptions.

But, contrary to libertarian rhetoric, we are not monads. From birth until death, our ability to reach our goals, even to survive, is tightly linked to our social interactions with others in our society.

MOST modern men take it for granted that empirical knowledge is dependent upon, or derived from, perception. There is, however, in Plato and among philosophers of certain other schools, a very different doctrine, to the effect that there is nothing worthy to be called “knowledge” to be derived from the senses, and that the only real knowledge has t

Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst political system in the world, except for all the others. Rightly or wrongly, people might reach the same conclusions about Big Data algorithms: they have lots of glitches, but we have no better alternative.

It isn’t essential that you know the final truth about everything in the world; and you don’t have the resources to discover it. Instead, the test to be applied to any idea is: does it work? Does your identification of things lead to the consequences you expect?