Philosophical good reads

[Mirage]

Isaac Asimov on why YOUR Ignorance doesn't equal MY Ignorance...

In every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proven to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about out modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.

Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing."

The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.

Let me dispose of Socrates because I am sick and tired of this pretense that knowing you know nothing is a mark of wisdom.

No one knows nothing. In a matter of days, babies learn to recognize their mothers. Socrates would agree, of course, and explain that knowledge of trivia is not what he means.

He means that in the great abstractions over which human beings debate, one should start without preconceived, unexamined notions.

Now where do we get the notion that "right" and "wrong" are absolutes?

Young children learn spelling, for instance, and here we tumble into apparent absolutes.

How do you spell "sugar?" Suppose Alice spells it p-q-z-z-f and Genevieve spells it s-h-u-g-e-r. Both are wrong, but is there any doubt that Alice is more wrong than Genevieve?

When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong.

But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is more wrong than both of them put together.

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Source: Relativity of Wrong: Essays on Science by Isaac Asimov

[Mirage]

A real life example demonstrating the value of questioning the Status Quo...

In his book entitled The Periodic Table, an Italian chemist named Primo Levi tells a comical yet telling situation he experienced working in a varnish factory in the 1940s. He noticed that the company's recipe for varnish included an onion, and this peaked his curiosity.

He couldn't figure out what value adding an onion into the mixture would provide, so he inquired around the factory. As it turned out, none of the laborers nor any of the management could explain the reasoning, only that this had always been one of the core ingredients and that it was vitally important.

No one knew

Even the fellow in charge of ordering onions for the factory was oblivious to the reasoning, but was assured by the fact that the recipe had been the same for generations. Levi thought there must be a reason that someone can explain, but none at the factory could help.

Making matters more difficult for Levi was that the man who had developed the recipe no longer worked at the factory. There was no one left who truly knew why the onion was required, yet none who remained that found value questioning the successful recipe.

Finally some answers

Unwillingly to let his curiosity be stifled, Levi eventually tracked down the originator of the varnish recipe who had long since retired to ask about the onions. As Levi explains,

"My predecessor, who was then more than seventy and had been making varnishes for fifty years, smiling benevolently behind his white mustache, explained to me that in actual fact that when he was young he had boiled the oil personally. Thermometers had not yet come into use; one judged the temperature of the batch by spitting into it, or more effectively, by immersing a slice of onion in the oil. When the onion began to fry, he the boiling was finished."

With the passage of time, what was simply a crude measuring device morphed into what was believed to be a vital ingredient, bolstered by the fact that everyone agreed. Only Levi had the courage to question the status quo, and as a result reduced the company's annual onion expenses to nil.

As  George Patton once pointed out, "If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking."

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Source: The Periodic Table by Primo Levi