[Wikimedia-l] Office hour inside out (program evaluation)

[Mathieu Stumpf]

Le 2013-03-24 19:57, Everton Zanella Alvarenga a écrit :
> "The main difference between science and stage magic is that in 
> science you
> make your mistakes in public. You show them off, so that everybody 
> can
> learn from them--not just yourself. This way, you get the benefit of
> everybody else's experience, and not just your own idiosyncratic path
> through the space of mistakes. This, by the way, is what makes us so 
> much
> smarter than every other species. It is not so much that our brains 
> are
> bigger or more powerful, but that we share the benefits that our 
> individual
> brains have won by their individual histories of trial and error.

I agree with the last sentence. Thus said I also think that science can 
teach us more relevant way to think our world when we make abstraction 
of our ego. Any thought about how smarter/greater/special/different 
human are, will just burden scientific investigation. I don't mean we 
should make total abstraction of ego, you need ego to sustain empathy, 
and without empathy reason is useless in codemning harasment, torture, 
murder and so on.

Now, why don't we take mistakes as a chance to refine our thought 
model, or even make a breakthrough in it? Well, there's this cult of 
"performance", and most people seems to prefer doing nothing than doing 
things and looks ridiculous. There's a famous quote, attributed to 
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, on this topic: "It's not because things are 
difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture 
that they are difficult".

-- 
Association Culture-Libre
http://www.culture-libre.org/