#rationality

By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There's no specific line, as you know. ↗

— Leo Ornstein

#call #difficult #establish #irrational #know

I have thought sometimes that the sanest people, the people who are just very balanced, very happy, are probably lower achieving than other people. My kind of irrationality happens to be fear or anxiety. ↗

— Jon Ronson

#anxiety #balanced #fear #happens #happy

Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains. ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains. ↗

— David Eagleman

#emotion #rationality #science #nature

We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#fanatic #irrationality #secularism #love

A Christian telling an atheist they're going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they're not getting any presents from Santa. ↗

— Ricky Gervais

#christianity #comedy #humor #humour #rationality

Elinor agreed with it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition. ↗

— Jane Austen

#compliments #discussion #disdain #intelligence #opposition

The second advantage claimed for naturalism is that it is equivalent to rationality, because it assumes a model of reality in which all events are in principle accessible to scientific investigation. ↗

— Phillip E. Johnson

#advantage #assumes #because #claimed #equivalent

In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something. ↗

— Krzysztof Kieslowski

#contemporaries #lost #much #our #rationality

Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political, and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility - for incompetence or worse. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#rationality #science #skepticism #intelligence

[...] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent time thinking about and defending your religion, and still haven't escaped the grip of Dark Side Epistemology, the inside of your mind ends up as an Escher painting. ↗

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

#rationality #religion #intelligence