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.

The Myth of the Framework page 195:

Men are not gods and they ought to know it. We shall never dominate nature. The mountaineer is to be pitied who sees in mountains nothing but adversaries he has to conquer -- who does not know the feeling of gratitude, and the feeling of his own insignificance in the face of nature.

Popper's idea that men are insignificant compared to nature applies to himself: Popper is insignificant next to a zebra or a pile of dirt.

At least that's what he says. I think that is ridiculous. I think Popper had more good ideas while walking over one hill than all zebras have ever had.

I'm reading Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher. He's been talking up Schopenhauer throughout the book. I finally got to the part where he explains Schopenhauer. On Magee's first attempt to read Schopenhauer, he found some quotes in a book about Schopenhauer. He gives half a dozen examples to show Schopenhauer's appeal and talent. I found every single example unimpressive. Meanwhile Magee tried to read the primary source and he found it impenetrable and dense and wasn't getting anything out of it and gave up.

Six years later, Magee tried again, and that time he loved Schopenhauer. One of the first things he actually says about Schopenhauer's ideas, on page 356, is:

Schopenhauer believed, along with a great many other people then and since, that Kant's most important insight was that what we human beings can think, perceive, know, experience, or be aware of in any way at all depends not only on what the reality is with which we have to deal but also on the apparatus we have for doing those things -- our human bodies with their senses, nervous systems and brains.

From this I have concluded that Schopenhauer is worthless (which I already suspected). It also confirms that Kant is worthless. Why?

First, this idea does not have the ring of great philosophy. It's not a penetrating insight. It's a lot closer to common sense. There's just nothing special about it. It seems to me that this idea must have been invented by countless people, most of whom didn't consider it worth making a fuss over. If this is the best Kant has to offer, then he is simply not a great philosopher. Even if it were true it would not be very impressive.

There is a major school of thought which existed before Kant, and which believes we gain knowledge of the world through our senses. Is it really the case that none of them ever considered the limitations of our sense organs before Kant pointed it out? That is not plausible. They must have considered the issue and had a reply already worked out.

Now for the critical flaw: Kant's "most important insight" is false.

As Popper taught us, starting points are not very important, what's important is to look for and correct errors. If you begin with limited and flawed ideas, so what? All our ideas are flawed anyway, and all our ideas are limited in their scope and understanding. That doesn't stop us making progress. Learning takes as input flawed and limited ideas, then proceeds to flawed and limited criticisms of them, and flawed and limited guesses at new ideas, and flawed and limited suggestions for minor changes to existing ideas, and outputs an unlimited stream of progress.

If your eyes are faulty that is not a fundamental handicap. You can get glasses or a microscope. You can ask questions of people with better eyesight. You can touch things to get a more accurate idea of their size. You can get a seeing eye dog. Or you can guess in what way your eyes are faulty, then reinterpret everything you see to account for the fault. And then you can see what goes right and what goes wrong, and adjust your way of reinterpreting. Even Hellen Keller was able to learn things.

No one's senses are perfectly reliable, and that isn't important.

One final issue is universality. There is some set of sense organs, which is fairly minimal, which allows one to do any measurement possible (with appropriate tools and aids, which you can construct). For example, only having the sense of touch would be sufficient to learn anything. You can construct artificial eyes which output braille. And a sound recorder that outputs braille. And a smeller and taster, and more. And therefore Kant's implication that we are limited in what we can measure/observe by the details of our sense organs is false. Even Hellen Keller had a universal set of sense organs.

Similar lines of argument apply to our nervous systems and brains which have universality, taking into account possible augmentations which we are capable of performing (after learning how to perform them, which we are also capable of).

All in all, it's not really a bad idea. If my neighbor told it to me, I'd give him some pointers and encourage him to think about it more. It's not obvious why it's false. But it's not great philosophy either.