Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee page 451:

According to the laws of physics nothing comes out of anyone's eyes at all. Light rays go into the eye, and cause all sorts of things to happen inside a person, such as seeing and headaches, but there is nothing at all that comes out of the eye into the surrounding space. According to all the scientific knowledge we have, what I see when I look into someone's eyes is the light from the surrounding air reflected back to me from the surfaces of the person's eyeballs, and that light is outside the person, the light in the air around us coming back at me again. If it is dark I cannot see the person: it is only by the surrounding light that I see the surfaces of his eyeballs, with whatever degree of clarity that allows. And that, according to science, is the whole of the situation. But who actually believes it? Who can believe it? The truth of which most of us have indubitable experience every day is that when I look into another person's eyes I am in what is for the most part a reliable degree of contact with multitudinous things going on inside that person--and he with multitudinous things going on inside me: feelings, moods, thoughts, intentions, hesitations, doubts, fears, hopes, and a host of other highly variegated inner states, together with attempts to conceal or dissemble any or all of those, most of it fleeting and flashing past in flickering instants of time, and the whole of it nuanced and inflected in subtle and sophisticated ways. Is there anyone who believes that this staunchless two-way flow of information is physically encoded on the surfaces of our eyeballs in a way that changes multitudinously instant by instant like a flow of orchestral sound (if so, how is it encoded?) and read off in the surrounding light by observers who instantly and accurately decode it in what is at both ends an essentially computing process? I have yet to hear of such a person.

I am such a person.

Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee page 441:

most people tend either to believe that all reality is in principle knowable or to believe that there is a religious dimension to things. A third alternative--that we can know very little but have equally little ground for religious belief--receives scant consideration, and yet seems to me to be where the truth lies. Simple though it is, people have difficulty getting their minds round it.

This standard plot is found in over 9000 movies:

omfg hi
omfg hi
omfg i lik u
omfg i'm coy
omfg i lik u 2
omfg we happy
omfg i did bad
omfg i hat u
omfg i sry
omfg fuk u
omfg i sry
omfg i sry
omfg i sry
omfg wtf fein
omfg i'm forgiven?
omfg i guess
omfg we're <3
omfg happy ever after

Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee page 414

[Bertrand Russell] believed that mathematics was a body of knowledge about reality until the young Wittgenstein convinced him that mathematical truths were tautologies.

Here are two unfortunate quotes by Popper:

http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3476946.html

if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.

Myth of the Framework page 125:

Avoidance of war is ... the overriding problem of public policy ... In this context it should be stated very clearly that one of the most disturbing aspects of recent events is the cult of violence. We all know that one of the most horrible aspects of our entertainment industry is the constant propaganda for violence, from allegedly harmless Westerns and crime stories to displays of cruelty pure and simple. It is tragic to see that this propaganda has had its effects even on genuine artists and scientists, and unfortunately also on our students (as the cult of revolutionary violence shows).

To solve a problem, or to accomplish anything at all, there are only three fundamental obstacles.

1) It may be impossible.

2) You may lack knowledge of how to do it.

3) You may not want to do it.

The first is about the laws of physics, the second the laws of epistemology, and the third the laws of morality. Because people are universal knowledge creators -- they can create any knowledge that can be created -- (2) can only be a temporary obstacle.

(1) can prevent us doing things, but it need not ever make us unhappy. Human problems are soluble within the laws of physics. Suppose we had the ideal world that was physically possible -- utopia. It would be ridiculous to be unhappy about that (especially given that in our present, imperfect society there is already a lot of good). So we can reach a point within the laws of physics which we can be happy with.

(3) can also prevent us doing things, but it can never make us unhappy. If we'd be happy about doing something then it allows it.

(2), despite being the temporary obstacle, is more problematic. We can create knowledge without limit, but there are no guarantees about when we'll learn a given thing. We might have a problem and not learn the knowledge that would solve it for hundreds of years. So to be happy (now) we need a life strategy that can cope with not having lots of knowledge. We can expect to have some knowledge, and some ignorance, and we can't guarantee having any specific piece of knowledge (or acquiring it in under a trillion years).

Fortunately we can get by with an arbitrarily large amount of ignorance. If we get stuck on a particular problem that we can't figure out then we can always replace it with a new one. And if we get stuck again then we can replace it again. We can do this without limit until we find a problem we know how to solve, now.

I may post the method later.

It's interesting to analyze people not by how left-wing or right-wing they are, but instead by which direction their mistakes tend to be in. Which direction on the political spectrum should they have moved to make less mistakes?

I have found many of examples of mistakes in a leftward direction. Karl Popper was sympathetic to socialism and disliked the influence of TV. Friedrich Hayek supported a guaranteed minimum income. David Friedman incorrectly conceded points about public goods to anti-capitalists. Bryan Magee, Richard Dawkins, and William Godwin provide further examples. All of these people would be well served by more right-wing attitudes.

It's hard to find good thinkers who could be improved by being more left wing. The best example I've found so far is Ann Coulter.

In other words, here are some mistakes common to the left wing: environmentalism, anti-capitalism and socialism, authoritarianism, anti-Americanism, anti-semitism, cultural relativism, moral relativism, being a revolutionary. And here are some mistakes common to the right wing: homophobia, anti-semitism, being pro-life, creationism, being overly attached to religion over reason, sexism. The items on the first list of mistakes are considerably more common among good thinkers than the items on the second list.

What this means isn't obvious.

As with Feynman's Physicists' History of Physics, airtight historical accuracy is not intended or relevant. This is a story about ideas, not really a history.

Once upon a time there were people. And then there were children and Judaism. After a few generations, a wise rabbi noticed that some adults are bad people, like murderers or pagans, and others were good people, like fellow rabbis, blacksmiths, or moneylenders.

And he noticed that as young children he couldn't see any critical difference in people. He couldn't predict who would turn out good, and who would turn out bad. He guessed that whether a child would be a good or bad person as an adult was not yet determined when they were still a child.

He tried preaching to people. He told them about how to be good people. He found very little success preaching to bad adults, but he found that in a controlled, double blind study the children he preached to turned out to be good adults at a much higher rate than children in a pagan control group.

And thus our Rabbi determined that human actions play a role in whether children grow up to be virtuous or wicked. But he wanted to help everyone, and some of the children he helped still turned out badly. What was going on? He needed an explanation.

He came up with the explanation that it is within a person's power to turn out either way, and they are able to choose which way they want to be. He found that the world made more sense taking into account this explanation. He found the explanation helped him and did not create any worse problems than he had before. He concluded that the explanation, while it may not be perfect, had content. There was something good about it.

Over the generations the idea of free will was refined. For example, people noticed that adults sometimes can make choices and change themselves. And they noticed that people get more than one choice in their whole life. And they noticed that the concept can be applied to simple things like "choosing" a flavor of ice cream. They also noticed that it sometimes may not apply; they noticed factors that can make it hard to choose; and they noticed factors that reliably make most exposed people turn out in a certain way.

Eventually, by the year 2008, the general understanding of free will was quite a bit better than the original, including the understanding of what is and is not an exception. Progress had been made.

If someone wants to say that free will is a bad concept, he needs to tell a better story. He needs to solve the same problems in a better way. If he wants to replace this story with nothing at all, that is a revolutionary, anti-Popperian approach which is inconsistent with the steady growth of knowledge. We need improved ideas that do a better job of solving our problems. We don't need a bunch of logicians to go on a rampage throwing out any ideas they don't understand well enough to justify, and leaving us to find new solutions from scratch.