From: Robin Hanson (hanson@hss.caltech.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 29 1996 - 10:11:40 MST
Eric Watt Forste writes:
>The most important sacred cow Anders mentioned is the idea that we
>know what we are doing. One of my favorite philosophers, William
>Bartley, made the observation (and he emphasised it) that we never
>know what we are saying and that we never know what we are doing.
>All our words and all our actions will have far more unintended
>consequences than intended ones. I don't know about the rest of
>the list, but I'm quite confident that we have no idea what we're
>doing. We ought to give it a good college try anyway.
We know more than nothing, less than everything. It is just as much a
mistake to think we know nothing as it is to think we know everything.
The goal is to be well-calibrated about how much we know.
Robin D. Hanson hanson@hss.caltech.edu http://hss.caltech.edu/~hanson/
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