Here's how it is, and this goes back to Socrates
 

Smart people tell us how right they are, and how much they know.

Wise people tell us where they made terrible errors and mistakes, and how much they don't know.

But what's left for the dumb people to do then?

For me, it's the people who falsely or unsuccessfully try to apply this premise that are the worst, though. People who constantly tell everyone how they cop to mistakes all the time, how they are very eager to learn when they're wrong... except they aren't really. Or they spend a lot of time telling everyone else how much they (other people) don't know, and think that's the same thing as admitting that they themselves don't know.

Yah but that is the difference between Socrates and I...I really don't know? lol!

Such as grammar, for instance... sigh... the objective case of I is me. This happens whether the pronoun is the object of a verb or of a preposition, in this case between.

Declining pronouns is a characteristic of Germanic-group languages, of which English is one in spite of its extensive Latinate vocabulary. (It's all in what we do around verbs. They are less likely to get pushed around than nouns.)

People are not being trained to any standard in English any more. My generation mostly knows better than that. [/grousing]

How right you are. How much you know.

:lol:

Can you give a little more information on the angle you want to take because I am really struggling with his methods and my bias against the political aspects of him and his protege.

Not to mention the little demi-god advise which Bush seemed to share. oh and all those noble lies for the good of the commoner.

SEE? I'm stuck.:greenface

It just HAD to come out! Even though you are going for another angle I am sure of it but those statements can be taken out of context because even though they hold a basis of truth they are so pat and cute.

It is my opinion that some days people are wise and some days they are smart.

It just depends upon which side of the bed I arose from and if I took my vitamin b12 for the day.

Are we only really just two types. I need more information. :)

I bow to your intellectual superiority. :eyebrow:

Passive aggressive thread is passive aggressive.

The same thing as smart people, but incorrectly.

You can take the Socrates out of it, Sky, if you like.

I think he was one of the first people to notice: that one of the smartest things he ever realized, was how much he didn't know.

I think of it when I read UG or Radar arguing like this:

I am right, because I am smarter than you.

The first thing I notice is that this incorrect on its face; it is not a logical argument; it's an Appeal to Authority.

There is a very rich irony in the "smartest" people constantly indulging in this logical fallacy.

But moreover, over time, I personally find intelligence to be kind of overrated. It's a personal thing. When I was a youngster, they gave me the long psych-supervised IQ tests, and they found that I was "gifted" and at the high end of the bell curve.

Now, in my middle ages, I see that this is a nice thing to have; like being good looking, or being coordinated, or getting good genes, or having rich parents. It's a little advantage you get, right out of the box. But A) it entitles you to exactly jack shit; like all the other advantages, it only matters what you do with it. And B) you wind up terribly wrong and utterly confused about a shitload of things, just like everybody else.

So, as I get older, I find that I pay more attention to people with a certain humility. (And not Rk's fake humility, as Clod pointed out, where at the end of the day he's still utterly self-absorbed and it's still all about him.)

phew..oh thanks I will. :greenface


Truth!

My son knows this so well.

You have set certain moral standard for yourself that is personal and deep.

It is more important that being smart or right.

Thank you for sharing UT :thumb:

It's funny UT brought this up. I've been thinking for weeks, about how I can't really know anything.

This is a horrible thought process as I try to job search and try and convince others to hire me. The marketable person does not think: I think I know a lot, but what can be truly known really?

It really isn't about being smart per se. It's about the impossibilities of truly knowing anything in a Universe full of mystery, and as-yet unknowns.

Pride goes before the fall?

We can examine the differences between being informed, and truly knowing.

An unexamined life is not worth living.
--Sew-crates. (Me knowed him)

"...as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."
-- the world according to http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:4...008/10/rum.gif + E

BacardiE? :p

RUMMY?

Humility is commendable, willful ignorance is not.
We can only know what we know today, with the understanding that tomorrow may bring information that changes what we know.
This is a common theme in the topics we discuss for home schooling. Lots of what we learn now is compared to what I learned way back when, so we can see, with this one generation, how knowledge changes over time. We are standing on the shoulders of giants, and at the same time, we become the giants.

Great thoughts on critical thinking Jinx.
There is no better gift to give our children than the tool of critical thought.

I'll take a critical thinker any day over a sophist.
( philosopher/politician)

The statements but me at a conundrum.

If I chose think I am smart then I am not wise.

If I say I know nothing then it is false humility in order to seem wise.

Critical thinking is beyond a persons ability to use language in order to manipulate.

...as I type my mind keeps wanting to put political flavors on it.
There are no greater sophists than our political leaders.

Bah, I know everything... just can't remember any of it. :o

See, I think the truly wise go further than that. They realize that knowledge is not a competition but a team effort and use their fuck-ups and what they learned from them to help others learn. But what do I know?

this is why she is so hot.

Jinx, did you know the tongue map, different areas of the tongue taste sweet, sour, etc, is bullshit?

http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/science...s-a-taste-map/

http://www.paulspond.com/index.php?entry=212

No wai! Thx, I emailed the kids the links...

Uh, the second link is a little... uh, salty. :o

Intelligence means nothing if it isn't disciplined. I don't necessarily agree with Socrates about the "know nothing" part, unless he was trying to make a exaggerated point, because that is too close to the "no absolute truth" argument, which just annoys the hell out of me. But I agree that the most disciplined intelligence comes from lowering one's pride and understanding that you will be wrong most of the time because not only are unbiased opinions on most issues impossible to obtain but many, if not all, are subjective or dynamic in nature.

You can both spell, and construct a grammatical, trenchant sentence.

There will always be that irreducible core of bright folks who simply can't string a written declarative sentence together. You might consider Charles Lyell, and what Stephen Jay Gould wrote about trying to wade through his lengthy, paragraphic sentences.

But then there are the ones resistant to both training and logic. Their output is wretchedly suggestive of a head constructed of carven pine throughout.

:lol2: :rolleyes:

Dude -- sit up straight and sin no more. It's not hard. :thepain:

Bruce, you have no room to laugh. Even if you voted Republican in November, where that puts you is level with me. Not a bad thing, but hardly a matter for snickering.

You were skewered, nailed to the fucking wall, and you admired the sentence structure. Dumb shit. :right:

More correctly, I do not care if he's trying to skewer. UT has always been able to write, and he tries to think. I do not let silliness from UT bother me -- I ignore unworthy sarcasm, and always will. He may have a philosophy of life. I think mine may be better. This means he can't stop me from being serene -- or (U)rbane. Same goes for you. Clear?

That's what I said, you didn't get it.

Post #29? That said nothing; it was all semiotic.

To abandon triviality momentarily, some latterday Pinocchios might have to struggle to distinguish

The suicide bomber burst into the room from The suicide bomber burst in the room.

That's what I said, you didn't get it.

I am telling you something you don't want to hear: if one is wise enough to attach little to no importance to something, there is then nothing one needs to "get." Triviality it was, triviality it remains; triviality lengthens with your replies.

UT was sarcastic? So, he's sarcastic. Nonetheless, he is thinking the right thought. I can accept that.

You cannot manage to turn me to your particular brand of unwisdom, Bruce, but you might do very well indeed if you abandoned it yourself. After all, it's not like you couldn't hew to the good and the wise. You've got the brains. You have at least some of the values. How about the rest?

Pip pip, stiff upper lip, don't let the troops know you've been shot. :lol2:

Bugger off Bruce, he ain't one of ours :P You're damn well keeping him.

Rest assured, most of America won't claim Californians as ours either.

We'll trade you for Neville Chamberlain. ;)

*grins*

Incidentally: I know some stuff. But what I don't know outweighs what I do know. Any assertion beyond that would be either false modesty or gross arrogance.

I think "gross arrogance" in his case.;)

This might be one of those anomalies where we actually know something. :D

:beer:

Watching this turn with interest. :corn:

I can't agree more. The more I learn the more I learn about what I don't know and on that note that I will never learn it all. I think the key is to stay engaged and take in as much as I can. In the end I will die.

bravo. insightful.

Ut oh.

I have suddenly realized this is not a serious thread.

Moving on.

It could have been. It's just the way it rolled.

Actually the epistemic skeptic would claim that no one can obtain knowledge and by my measure they are correct. The best that anyone can do is form a justified true belief- not knowledge. Knowledge requires absolute universal observation and of course this is impossible via DesCartes' "madman deceiving" principle.

Not only this, but in order to even form a justified true belief one must escape the infinite regression problem that we find in foundationalist claims.

And yet, if Chuck Norris punches you in the nose, you will absolutely know it.

Glatt, you are amusing.

Hiya Crotalus, since you seem philosophically inclined, try David Lewis' article Elusive Knowledge. You may find your sceptical doubts are somewhat eased. He argues that what counts as a relevant consideration depends on the subject of inquiry - and so for everyday purposes we do have knowledge of the world, and it is only when philosophers start musing on the nature of reality and knowledge that sceptical scenarios become relevant considerations, and thus knowledge becomes "elusive".

I'd add that all sceptical positions require us to accept that some scenario is possible - Descartes' evil demon, the matrix, etc. All current accounts of modal epistemology make it piggyback on real epistemology, so how could a sceptic know that such a scenario is possible? Scepticism, like post-modernism, gets sucked down into a vicious regress of it's own creation.

A working knowledge, as opposed to academic knowledge.

Someone said...
The key is not knowledge, it's access to it.

Someone else said....
The key is in the fake stone next to the boot scraper. You need to jiggle it a bit.

Which updates Samuel Johnson's "Thus I refute. . ."

Who was that unfortunate refutee?

I seem to have recast the phrasing from Johnson to Collier: Bishop Berkeley, arguing how material things, er, weren't.