The Great Melody by Conor Cruise O'Brien page 42 quoting Burke on why more Catholics didn't convert to Protestantism due to the Irish Penal Laws:

Now as to the other point, that the objects of these Laws suffer voluntarily ... it supposes, what is false in fact, that it is in a man's moral power to change his religion whenever his convenience requires it. If he be beforehand satisfied that your opinion is better than his, he will voluntarily come over to you, and without compulsion; and then your Law would be unnecessary; but if he is not so convinced, he must know that it is his duty in this point to sacrifice his interest here to his opinion of his eternal happiness, else he could have in reality no religion at all. In the former case, therefore, as your Law would be unnecessary; in the latter, it would be persecuting; that is, it would put your penalty and his ideas of duty in the opposite scales; which is, or I know not what is, the precise idea of persecution.

Reminds me of Godwin. It has the same concept of persuasion. Either I, in my own judgment, come to see your idea as best, and so compulsion is unnecessary, or I don't, in which case you can't reasonably expect me to change my mind. Godwin would say in the second case you should rethink whether you are correct if you can't be persuasive; Burke here says in the second case you can't say people are volunteering to suffer, because they'd suffer either way they chose.

I started reading The Great Melody by Conor Cruise O'Brien. comments and summary of notable bits follow.

Churchill had a very good interpretation of burke! ^_^

man, you hear about Churchill in school of course for his role in WWII, but no one tells you he was a skillful historian and epistemologist. and the commie WWII hater types who bash Churchill certainly are ignorant of it!

so the good interpretation of burke is roughly: Burke is a classical liberal. a very important one who revived that way of thinking. he was consistent in this throughout his entire political career. he hated tyranny and abuse of power. Conor calls this the Whig interpretation, and it was dominant until ~1930.

some very harsh and false attacks were made on Burke by James Mill (John Stuart Mill's father).

a bastard named Namier trashed Burke's reputation and held major sway from 1930-1970 and beyond. he didn't ever refute the good interpretation. he just pretended it had already been refuted and referred to it that way and implied only a simpleton would think otherwise. he also focussed his writing mostly on second and third rate people. seems like something out of Atlas Shrugged. "give the little guy a chance; the important people already got to be important in their own time, just ignore them now to even things up"

one of the bastard's books trashing burke only mentions burke 8 times. he's subtle. one could read the book and not realize burke was the primary target. he acts like burke doesn't matter to history, and is only worth mentioning in passing. he talks about issues where burke was very influential and fails to mention burke's famous speech and sort of takes it for granted that it's too ridiculous to bother examining. in the few passing remarks, and with no evidence to support it, and ignoring that these interpretations were refuted at length in existing books, Namier says Burke is a lackey without special skill who spreads myths. then Namier went back to talking at length about people he admitted weren't very important, but were evidently more important to discuss than Burke. Namier tries to get reader's to accept his statements about Burke on authority; he supplies no evidence for them. it's true that Namier did a lot of research, but he didn't spend that time researching Burke, he instead focussed on the second-raters.

Namier's next book is worse. this stuff is really wicked. but conor is dignified and objective and unemotional. i guess that's more effective. he just points out the facts and lets the reader use his own judgment, without ever suggesting what is the appropriate feeling.

it's pretty frustrating how such a bastard with such anti-truth-seeking and immoral tactics -- which are despicable even by mainstream standards -- can be so influential. Besides the obvious, Conor should never have had to waste his time reading that filth, let alone commenting on it; it'd be nicer if his book was about good things. but i don't disagree with his judgment that including the Namier stuff was for the best. Namier did exist and does need discrediting. sigh.

Confessions of a Philosopher, by Bryan Magee, pg 193:

[Popper's epistemology] is worked out on such a scale, and yet in such detail, that it constitutes an intellectual achievement of the front rank. It is the most highly developed philosophy yet to have appeared that incorporates within itself a belief in an independently existing material world subsisting in independently existing space and time. It constitutes a huge advance beyond Russell, and embodies a depth of originality and imagination altogether outside Russell's scope. Anyone who is determined to cling to the empiricist tradition will find in Popper's philosophy the richest and most powerful instantiation of it that the ongoing development of Western philosophy has made available to us so far. At the point we have reached around the year 2000, to be a self-aware and sophisticated empiricist has to mean either being a Popperian or being a critical and reconstructed Popperian. And to be any sort of transcendental idealist ought to involve embracing something like a Popperian account of empirical reality. On either presupposition, he is the foremost philosopher of the age.

Bryan Magee, in Confessions of a Philosopher, says that witt's 2nd major book (of 2), Philosophical Investigations, is written so most readers won't see (on first reading, i guess) what one paragraph has to do with the next. and though individual sentences are clear, it's often hard to tell why they are there.

eww.

he then mentions that Popper considers none of witt's ideas to be any good. (for some reason, Magee himself likes some of them). please note that in general Popper was very forgiving and lenient with bad philosophers (e.g. Kant, Hume, and Berkeley), so when he says Witt was worthless that is *very strong* condemnation.

oh wow, here is a strong quote p118

Since the later philosophy of Wittgenstein not only is not about philosophical problems in any traditional sense but denies their authentic existence, it is capable of appealing powerfully only to people who do not have philosophical problems. This explains two things about it that might otherwise be difficult to account for simultaneously: its great appeal to academic philosophers and its attractions for people outside philosophy.

(Magee has talked earlier in the book about how many academic philosophers do not have philosophical problems)

After I mailed in my 23" cinema display and Apple received it at their repair center, they decided to cancel my repair and give me a bunch of grief about it not being in warranty. This is the third time they gave me grief about the same issue. I'm still right, and they still owe me warranty repairs. And they still acknowledged this the previous times, and promised me warranty coverage. (They advertised that you could buy macbook + cinema display + macbook applecare and the applecare would cover the display too. They say this was a mistake and it's only supposed to work with other computers but not macbooks. Too bad. They must honor the terms on their website at time of sale. It's only an $80 value, so I don't see why they keep bothering me about it.)

This time they are refusing to admit that they are obligated to give me warranty coverage as advertised. And the contact info I have for the people I spoke with previously no longer works. However, they made some excuse about "it's only one month out of the three month coverage you are entitled to after the last repair" and repaired it anyway, so I stopped trying to reason with them.

On the upside, it works now. It had stopped turning on. Now it does. Yay!

Oh and the same day I got my display back (today), I also received a second box for mailing it in. Silly Apple is a bit disorganized I guess. For my previous repair they also managed to send me two shipping boxes.

Despite this hassle, I will continue to buy Apple products, which are wonderful.

My 23" Apple Cinema Display, which I love, needed repairs (under warranty). I sent it off at 2pm on Monday. It arrived back at 10am on Wednesday. That's less than 48 hours that I had to suffer with an inferior display. The actual repair took them ~3 hours, the rest was shipping. They replaced the whole screen part of the display, no questions asked, no problem (some pixels on top were darker/discolored). Thanks Apple!

- most people do as well as convention/tradition. and experience it as easy to do so.

- most people have ideas about how to do things better. some proportion of those ideas seem obvious, easy to implement

- most people consequently think tradition is nice for "most people" who aren't as bright as they are, but clearly they are brighter than it, since they do it easily plus have good ideas for improvements. the people who made the tradition must not have been as bright as them, since they missed the obvious improvements.

- the real fact of the matter is that traditions are wiser than people, and most of the supposed obvious improvements are either bad ideas, or are difficult to implement and the person doesn't actually know how to make it happen

- so the basic issue is taking for granted what we have, and underestimating the difficulty of having more based on the ease of the taken-for-granted stuff

- this is not a mistake *everyone* makes. Edmund Burke emphatically did not make it.

- and there are some people who make the mistake more. for example ivory tower academics are prone to this.

- regardless, 'most people are dumb' is a common sentiment. but this particular reason behind it -- that they are not making the "obvious" improvements on convention that the speaker has thought of -- is a mistake.

- the 'most people are dumb' sentiment often comes up in discussion of religion. in particular it is sometimes suggested that most religious people are dumb. in the ballpark of 90% of Americans are religious, so that's most Americans.

- atheism consists of a number of apparent improvements on religion, most of which consist of throwing stuff out, and most of which seem obvious to the sort of evangelical atheist who says most religious people are dumb. don't pray, don't listen to sermons, don't be involved in church groups, don't believe in God, don't believe in heaven, hell, miracles, don't read the Bible, don't listen to advice just because it's Biblical or Christian, don't respect your local religious leaders, and more. are some of those good ideas? yes in some form. are they actually all obvious and easy to implement? no.

- from the list of things atheism consists of: have most religious people already implemented at least one of these in their life? yes. successfully? beneficially? yes. and what about atheists, they've generally implemented most or all of them. but successfully? beneficially? sometimes yes, sometimes no, frequently unclear.

Here is some especially good Feynman stuff from the book Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track:

Page xix: Feynman wanted to marry, but worried he was being too impulsive. So he marked a day on his calendar a few months ahead and planned only to propose if he still felt the same way on that day. It's wonderful how he was willing to second guess his own judgment in an area where he knew he might make mistakes. In the event, he still felt the same way and proposed on the marked day. It must have been very tempting to propose early since he felt so strongly. After a few weeks of feeling like that he could have thought, "I have waited. I still feel the same. Nothing is going to change. I've done my experiment. I should propose now." But Feynman had the integrity to wait. One of the things Feynman told us about science is that it helps us to avoid fooling ourselves, which is normally very easy. It's also easy to fool yourself when you're in love, so I think it was very wise of him to wait the full duration.

Page xix:

Of my father's many skills, this willingness to play the fool—and to let me think he could be completely outfoxed by my clever thinking—was the one that shaped my childhood more than any other.

I [Feynman's daughter] was simply unaware for many years that he was revered as a supreme intellect.

Feynman's humility is impressive. He didn't even mention his status to his children. Many people, including Feynman, have said we should not trust in authorities and experts, or take them too seriously. Feynman once defined science as belief in the ignorance of experts. But Feynman took this attitude much further than most people. He really didn't want to listen to authorities, or have anyone listen to his. And he wouldn't even passively let it happen if people wanted to treat him as an authority; he made a genuine effort to prevent it.

Of course, some people won't listen to Feynman no matter what he says about how they should use their own judgment. Rather, they have completely ignored what he said so they can treat his every word as revealed truth. :)

Page xx: Feynman taught his daughter some shortcuts an alternate approaches for solving math problems. Her teacher scolded her for not solving the problems in "the right way". Feynman went to speak to the teacher, who didn't know who Feynman was and treated him like an idiot. The teacher even accused Feynman of not knowing anything about math. Finally Feynman stopped biting his tongue. In the long run he had to teach math to his daughter personally. His humble attitude is admirable, as well as his involved parenting.

Page 373: Feynman's last words before he died in 1988 were: "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."