Discussion Quotes - page 7
If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God.
Stephen Hawking
The next meeting was scheduled for the next day, January 25. But there, the BMAC scholars simply did not show up. The unambiguous result of the debate was this: the BMAC scholars have run away from the arena. They had not presented written evidence worth the name, they had not given a written refutation of the VHP scholars' arguments, they had wriggled out of a face-to-face discussion on the accumulated evidence, and finally they had just stayed away. Thus ended the first attempt by the Government of India to find an amicable solution on the basis of genuine historical facts.
Koenraad Elst
As I have already hinted, one of the directions of work which the realm of ideas of the Macy meetings has suggested concerns the importance of the notion and the technique of communication in the social system. It is certainly true that the social system is an organization like the individual, that it is bound together by a system of communication, and that it has a dynamics in which circular processes of a feedback nature play an important part. This is true, both in the general fields of anthropology and sociology and in the more specific field of economics; and the very important work, which we have already mentioned, of von Neumann and Morgenstern on the theory of games enters into this range of ideas. On this basis, Drs. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead have urged me, in view of the intensely pressing nature of the sociological and economic problems of the present age of confusion, to devote a large part of my energies to the discussion of this side of cybernetics.
Norbert Wiener
Life as we live it is obviously very brutal, and makes us insensitive, dull, heavy, stupid, and so we may hope through ideas, through ideational mentation, to bring about a certain quality of sensitivity.... But even when we are sharpened and quickened intellectually by argument, by discussion, by reading, this does not actually bring about that quality of sensitivity. And you know all those people who are erudite, who read, who theorize, who can discuss brilliantly, are extraordinarily dull people. So I think sensitivity, which destroys mediocrity, is very important to understand. Because most of us are becoming, I am afraid, more mediocre. We are not using that word in any derogative sense at all, but merely observing the fact of mediocrity in the sense of being average, fairly well educated, earning a livelihood and perhaps capable of clever discussion; but this leaves us still bourgeois, mediocre, not only in our attitudes but in our activities.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Cultural systems will be treated as extensions of the power to learn, store, and transmit information, and the evolution of culture as dependent upon the biological development of these abilities and the cultural developments that actualize them. Man's increasing mastery over the natural world, with its increments of available energy use, can be seen from this point of view as one consequence of his capacity to learn, invent, borrow, store, and transmit the necessary technological and political inventions for the changes of scale involved in increasing utilization of energy. Instead of focusing attention on discontinuities - the invention of tool-making tools, the invention of agriculture, the invention of writing, and the invention of invention as a conscious pursuit-this discussion will focus on the continuities involved and on the extent to which older forms of communication, energy use, and social organization also undergo transformation in the course of cultural evolution.
Margaret Mead
The inversion theory has a long and fascinating history in the discussion of vertebrate origins. The founding version dates to the early nineteenth century and became the centerpiece of a movement often called "transcendental biology," and centered on the attempt to reduce organic diversity to one or a very few archetypal building blocks that could generate all actual anatomies as products of rational laws of transformation. Some of Europe's greatest thinkers participated in this grand, if flawed enterprise. Goethe, Germany's preeminent poet-scientist, tried to explain the varied parts of plants as different manifestations of an archetypal leaf.
Stephen Jay Gould
It is also our hope that the interpretation of the socio-economic optimum as a set of institutions may help to get under way a discussion of a more scientific character than was usual so far about the relative merits of various existing socio-economic orders, especially those of Eastern and Western Europe, including such interesting cases as Sweden, Switzerland and Yugoslavia. A considerable amount of better information about various types of external effects will be one of the necessary ingredients if we want to give concrete content to such merit rating of various systems.
Jan Tinbergen
Ever since prehistoric antiquity one field of study after another has crossed the divide between what the historian might call its prehistory as a science and its history proper. These transitions to maturity have seldom been so sudden or so unequivocal as my necessarily schematic discussion may have implied. But neither have they been historically gradual, coextensive, that is to say, with the entire development of the fields within which they occurred.
Thomas Samuel Kuhn
Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group that some people have called the "nuclear theologians," who in effect said this is a complicated issue of seeing how little we can give away, how much we can extract from the other side; it's highly specialized. Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons, the delivery systems, the targeting, the nature of the MIRV and the CRUISE, on down, and the MX. This kept the whole discussion to a very limited group of people who, in a way, had assumed responsibility for saying whether we should live or die.
John Kenneth Galbraith
[ Milton Friedman was] the dominant member of the so-called Chicago school of economics [during his tenure at Chicago]... The economics department increasingly reflected his approach and interests. These included deep commitment to the truth, appreciation of markets and free enterprise, frank and blunt discussion, and enormous zeal to convince the heathen. But most important was the commitment to economic analysis as a powerful instrument for interpreting economic and social life.
Gary Becker
In this aspect, the case for democracy rests on the argument that free discussion and expression of opinion are the most suitable techniques of arriving at the moral imperative implicitly common to all. Voting, from this point of view, is not a device whereby each individual expresses his personal interests, but rather where each individual gives his opinion of the general will.
Kenneth Arrow
You can't argue with facts and figures. Either people want it, in which case they pay for it, or it's two guys sitting around at the Plaza having a discussion, which means nothing. I mean, Titanic. I wasn't crazy about the movie. But you know what? I'm gonna shut up, because the people have spoken. End of story!
Gene Simmons
