True Believers in science believe, in short, that every phenomenon can be reduced to a few governing equations, as with physics. It’s inconceivable to them that there could be phenomena so complex as to be irreducible in this sense, despite their interacting every day with two textbook examples: the economy, and the weather.
— Hadrien Laporte
Category: Hadrien Laporte Quotes
Hadrien Laporte on Open-Mindedness
How do you persuade people who pride themselves on their intelligence to consider any novel idea, when that idea involves a truth they don’t want to hear, don’t want to think about, and will refuse to entertain even provisionally, even in those private moments when no one else can possibly guess what they’re thinking?
— Hadrien Laporte
Hadrien Laporte on the Rational Skeptic
The most energetic champion of the rational, skeptical, scientific worldview will still recoil with indignation when someone follows the intellectual virtues for which he advocates to a conclusion he doesn’t like.
— Hadrien Laporte
Hadrien Laporte on the Jealousness of Smarts
There is a form of social illness whose sufferers can not only not tolerate encountering different opinions and ideas in person, but cannot bear the thought that such things might exist unencountered in the minds and conversations of others. If they can’t observe these thoughts and aren’t party to such conversations, how can they demonstrate their moral and intellectual superiority by intervening with The Truth?
– Hadrien Laporte
Hadrien Laporte on Circular Thinking
He says, in effect: ‘Those who are smart are good. Those who are good hold these views. Those who hold these views are smart.’
It’s a childish circular reasoning of the sort that you’d expect someone who claims to have a superior mind would have the dignity to reject.
– Hadrien Laporte
Hadrien Laporte on Academic Corruption
Just as public funding corrupts research universities, so too can funding from non-governmental sources when it represents a sizeable and non-anonymized portion of a given department’s funding. Funding from large businesses, wealthy individuals, or deep-pocketed foundations, if it accounts for a sufficiently large percent of the school’s or department’s activities, will procure the results these want. ‘Focused research’ will find what is paid for, and should those findings reflect the the truth that scientific and academic institutions claim to seek, it is purely accidental.
— Hadrien Laporte