psychology Knowledge
Knowledge and information in society
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View Full Quote"The world doesn't just contain optimists and pessimists, and wise and unwise technology users. It contains enemies of civilization as well. And knowledge is impartial. It can be used for good or evil. But the enemies of civilization all necessarily have one thing in common. They are wrong. And so they fear error correction and truth. And that's why they resist changes in their ideas, which makes them less creative and slower to innovate. So our defense against the existential danger from malevolent uses of technology, the only defense, is speed. The good guys must use their only advantage to stay ahead."
"Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge."
menu_book The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
View Full Quote"Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress."
menu_book The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
View Full Quote"Problems are soluble. Given the right knowledge, any problem can be solved. The key is that we must be open to creating that knowledge through conjecture and criticism."
menu_book The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
View Full Quote"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
menu_book Law, Legislation and Liberty
View Full QuoteView Full Quote"If you don't believe it or don't get it, I don't have the time to try to convince you, sorry."
"The future is open. It is not predetermined and thus cannot be predicted — except by accident. The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite."
menu_book The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality
View Full Quote"The vision of the anointed is not simply a vision of the world and its functioning in descriptive terms, but is also a vision of themselves and of their place in the world. Self-congratulation is part of that vision, as is a disdain for the benighted masses who do not share it."
menu_book The Vision of the Anointed
View Full Quote"The constrained vision sees the evils of the world as deriving from the limited and biased nature of man himself — and therefore sees the social challenge as being to make the best of the possibilities which exist within that constraint, rather than to try to change human nature."
menu_book A Conflict of Visions
View Full Quote"In the unconstrained vision, human nature is not fixed but is capable of being changed by social institutions and social policies. If human beings are capable of improvement — even of perfection — then the question of how to design the best society, with the best social institutions, is a much more open-ended question than if human nature is treated as a given constraint."
menu_book A Conflict of Visions
View Full Quote"When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness."
menu_book Democracy in America
View Full Quoteauto_stories Books
A Conflict of Visions
Sowell's landmark 1987 work arguing that the deepest divide in political and social thought is not between left and right, but between two fundamen...
Read MoreThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
Exploration of how explanatory knowledge grows and transforms our understanding, arguing that all progress comes from the quest for good explanations
Read MoreI, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read
A classic essay illustrating the concept of spontaneous order through the story of a pencil's creation, demonstrating how no single person possesse...
Read MoreKnowledge and Decisions
Analysis of how knowledge is used in economic decision-making, examining the role of prices, incentives, and institutions in coordinating dispersed...
Read MoreThe Vision of the Anointed
The 1995 sequel to *A Conflict of Visions*, focusing specifically on the unconstrained vision as held by a self-appointed intellectual elite — 'the...
Read Moreperson Authors
psychology Concepts
Bullshit Asymmetry Principle
The amount of energy needed to refute false or misleading information (bullshit) is an order of magnitude greater than the effort required to produ...
Learn MoreDunning-Kruger Effect
A cognitive bias where people with limited competence or knowledge in a specific domain greatly overestimate their own abilities. The same lack of ...
Learn MoreMünchhausen Trilemma
A fundamental problem in epistemology demonstrating that any attempt to justify a claim of knowledge inevitably leads to one of three unsatisfactor...
Learn MoreThe Principle of Optimism
All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. This principle, articulated by physicist and philosopher school Philosophy psychology Knowledge wb_sunny Optimism menu_book Epistemology